Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia's Republics 9780801460722

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Tables
Preface
1. Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Ordinary People, and Group Grievance
2. Variation in Mass Nationalism across Russia’s Republics
3. Does Structure Matter? Local Labor Markets and Social Mobility
4. Supporting National Sovereignty in Tatarstan
5. Nationalism in a Socialist Company Town: Tatars, Russians, and the Kamskii Automobile Works in Naberezhnye Chelny
6. Ethnic Entrepreneurs and the Construction of Group Grievance: Tuva, Mari El, and Komi Compared
7. Secessionism from the Bottom Up: Democratization, Nationalism, and Local Accountability in Russia
8. Lessons from Russia: A Critical View of the Relationship between Ethnic Elite Claims and Mass Interests
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE

CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics Elise Giuliano

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2011 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Giuliano, Elise, 1968– Constructing grievance : ethnic nationalism in Russia’s republics / Elise Giuliano. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4745-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Minorities—Political activity—Russia (Federation) 2. Russia (Federation)— Ethnic relations. 3. Nationalism—Russia (Federation) 4. Self-determination, National—Russia (Federation) 5. Russia (Federation)—Politics and government— 1991– I. Title. JN6693.5.M5G58 2011 320.54089'00947—dc22 2010038701 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Preface 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Ordinary People, and Group Grievance Variation in Mass Nationalism across Russia’s Republics Does Structure Matter? Local Labor Markets and Social Mobility Supporting National Sovereignty in Tatarstan Nationalism in a Socialist Company Town: Tatars, Russians, and the Kamskii Automobile Works in Naberezhnye Chelny Ethnic Entrepreneurs and the Construction of Group Grievance: Tuva, Mari El, and Komi Compared Secessionism from the Bottom Up: Democratization, Nationalism, and Local Accountability in Russia Lessons from Russia: A Critical View of the Relationship between Ethnic Elite Claims and Mass Interests

Bibliography Index

vii ix xi

1

29

60 91

126

145

185

206

215 229

Figures

Map 1.1.

Autonomous areas in Russia

8

Ethnic demonstrations and violent events in Russia’s autonomous republics

Figure 2.1.

36

Figure 2.2.

Titular support for AR declarations of sovereignty

39

Figure 2.3.

Titular support for secession

39

Titulars defining themselves as representative of republic rather than Russia

40

Ratio of titular/Russian representation in white-collar workforce, 1989

78

Number of working-age persons without jobs in Russia’s republics, 1985–95 (in thousands)

85

Figure 2.4.

Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.2.

Number of ethnic demonstrations in Russia’s republics versus index of secessionism

196

Number of ethnic demonstrations as a percentage of total demonstrations in Russia’s republics versus index of secessionism

198

Number of ethnic mass violent events in Russia’s republics versus index of secessionism

198

Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.2.

Figure 7.3.

vii

Tables

Table 2.1.

Mass nationalism in Russia’s republics, 1989–94

35

Table 2.2. Demography and nationalist mobilization in Russia’s republics, 1989 Table 3.1.

48

Demographic and socioeconomic trends in Russia’s

republics

66

Table 3.2.

Index of trends in socioeconomic stratification

67

Table 3.3.

Index of socioeconomic stratification as of 1989

68

Table 3.4. Average rank of republics: Index of socioeconomic stratification, 1989

81

Average rank of republics: Index of trends in socioeconomic stratification

81

Table 3.6. Average rank of Russia’s republics on indexes of socioeconomic stratification

81

Table 3.5.

Table 3.7.

Nationalism and socioeconomic stratification

87

Table 4.1.

The urbanization of ethnic groups in Tatarstan (%)

95

Table 4.2. Level of education of Tatarstan’s employed population, 15 years and older (%) Table 4.3.

95

Ethnic composition of the workforce in Tatarstan

98

Table 4.4. Percentage of Tatars and Russians employed in various economic sectors, 1989

99

Table 4.5. Distribution of employees in Tatarstan by economic sector, 1990–93 (in thousands)

101

The effect of ethnicity on which group obtains the most prestigious professions in Tatarstan

116

Table 4.6.

Ethnic composition of KamAZ workforce, 1989

135

Table 5.2. Perceptions of change in interethnic relations in Tatarstan, 1990 (%)

143

Table 5.1.

Table 6.1.

Case selection for discourse analysis

151

Table 6.2. Issues in the founding charters of nationalist organizations

152 ix

x

TABLES

Table 6.3.

Discourse analysis of Tuvan newspapers

166

Table 6.4.

Discourse analysis of Mari El newspapers

173

Table 6.5.

Discourse analysis of Komi newspapers

181

Table 7.1.

Index of secessionism in Russia’s republics, 1989–94

188

Preface

This book began as a microstudy about why people in the Russian republic of Tatarstan threw their support behind nationalist movements in the early 1990s. It developed into an investigation comparing all of Russia’s republics. Why did people with minority ethnic identities in some other republics—which were analogous to Tatarstan in so many ways—pass through this period with so little interest in movements calling for national revival? Why didn’t the Russian Federation mimic the Soviet Union’s implosion along ethnic lines? Investigating these questions prompted a set of inquiries into the relationship between mass and elite, individual identity and nationalist ideology, and the role of economic structures versus human agency in the formation of political preferences. Contrary to popular expectations as well as to the broad attention the subject has received among scholars, nationalism very often fails to take root. Russia, with its fluctuating and ultimately failed nationalist mobilizations across its republics, is a case in point. Throughout the book I show that the usual suspects— cultural difference, religion, language, demographic crises, and levels of regional wealth or poverty—do not lead to nationalism. What does inspire people to respond to leaders calling for nationalist transformation? I argue that people must develop a group grievance—a feeling of resentment about important aspects of their present situation—that they share with other people with the same ethnic affiliation. Grievances are not simply present (or absent) among people with ethnic identities; rather, they develop out of an interaction between people’s lived experiences and the specific messages that nationalists articulate to make sense of those experiences. For grievances to develop, it is not enough for nationalists to define current conditions as unjustly oppressing people with a particular ethnic identity; they must also convince individuals that their personal interests in material success and social status are tied to the fate of the nation. Nationalist leaders try, in other words, to create a sense of nationhood among people by stoking a sense of outrage that current conditions (the status quo) ignore their interests on the basis of their ethnicity. The nationalist message cannot exist at a purely rhetorical level. It must describe, with a certain degree of plausibility, people’s experience of existing realities. Where nationalism emerged in Russia’s republics, nationalist entrepreneurs depicted an ethnic injustice: inequality in local labor markets. Their message was xi

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PREFACE

not entirely accurate, for the labor situation in Russia’s republics actually privileged titular minorities vis-à-vis ethnic Russians in many ways. But the nationalist message resonated with central experiences of the time: rising job insecurity and fear of unemployment in the crisis-ridden economy of the late Soviet era. Thus, nationalism develops out of a dynamic interaction between economic structures, the discourse of political entrepreneurs, and the experiences of ordinary people. This combination suggests that mass nationalist mobilization is far from easy and that the sustained politicization of mass ethnic populations is actually more of a rare than a regular occurrence. This book joins several other recent approaches to the subject of nationalism and ethnic politics to chip away at the expectation— often found among policymakers and other interested observers—that people with ethnic affiliations form distinct interest groups ready to mobilize behind nationalist leaders at a moment’s notice. A project that undergoes as many evolutions as this one has incurs a lot of debts along the way. First, I acknowledge the Department of Political Science of the University of Chicago, where this project began, for providing a remarkably stimulating environment. I was very fortunate to have had a trio of brilliant advisers: David Laitin, Ronald Suny, and John Padgett not only offered support through the various phases of the project but also provided specific, valuable, and very diverse criticisms and insights. It is no exaggeration to say that I cannot imagine a better experience, and I am grateful to each of them. I express particular appreciation to David Laitin. He provided an example of how to “do” political science in so many respects, from conducting field research to carrying out fine-grained, well-documented comparative research across the Soviet space. I am grateful for his consistent support over the years. I acknowledge and express appreciation to the various institutions that have supported the research and writing of this book, including Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the University of Miami. I am also grateful for financial support provided by IREX and the American Political Science Association, the United States Institute of Peace, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Mellon Foundation–University of Chicago Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the MacArthur Foundation Council for the Advanced Study of Peace and International Cooperation Dissertation Fellowship. Colleagues and scholars have offered comments on various aspects of my research and book, for which I am very appreciative, including Rawi Abdelal, Dominique Arel, John Breuilly, Dawn Brancati, Tim Colton, Kathleen Collins, Jim Fearon, Tim Frye, Cora Sol Goldstein, Dmitry Gorenburg, Stephen Hanson, Yoshiko Herrera,

PREFACE

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John Kenny, Tomila Lankina, Alena Ledeneva, Stathis Kalyvas, Cynthia Kaplan, Pal Kolsto, Harris Mylonas, Phil Roeder, Blair Ruble, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Tom Simons, Oxana Shevel, Louise Davidson-Schmich, Stephen Saidemann, Jack Snyder, Josh Tucker, Pieter Van Houten, and Lucan Way. Particular thanks to Dominique Arel and Blair Ruble for their support and suggestions throughout the Kennan Institute’s Workshop series on Multicultural Legacies in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus and the publication of an edited volume from that workshop. The Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LiCEP) provided an unparalleled workshop setting for stimulating discussions with other people who care deeply about ethnic politics. I am grateful to all its members for those discussions. In particular I acknowledge the supportive and excellent advice I received about writing and publishing a book from Elisabeth Wood and Michael Hechter. I am also indebted to my research assistants: Alevtina Gavrilova, Antonio Lupher, Garrett Ho, Albert Petichenskiy, and Nick Voitsekhovitch. Conducting research in Russia would not have been possible without the many kind hosts I met in both Tatarstan and Moscow. I am grateful especially to Guzel Stoliarova, Damir Iskhakov, and Rosa Musina—scholars in Kazan who shared their time and expertise, from recommending interviewees to consistently providing a sounding board when I would return to their offices to discuss the latest information I had learned about Tatarstani politics. Guzel in particular offered her friendship and skilled assistance with my large survey project. I also thank Galia Zakirova of the Tatarstan National Library for stimulating conversations, as well as research assistants and friends: Gulfiya, Marat, Natasha, Deborah Ballard, and Larissa, Julia, and Lev Sumskii. I was particularly lucky to have shared a period of time during my field research in Kazan with my friend and colleague Kate Graney who was always ready to discuss Tatar politics if our telephone lines could maintain a connection. I thank Jeff Kahn for sharing his Kazan interview notes. My research at Moscow libraries and institutes was improved immeasurably by the research assistance of Boris Rubanov and the guidance of Mikhail Guboglo of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as Tania Guboglo. I express sincere appreciation to Roger Haydon of Cornell University Press for his advice, supervision, and patience throughout the publication process. I am also very grateful to my incredibly constructive anonymous reviewers whose suggestions were both useful and practical. My friends and family eased the bookwriting process by always being willing to listen. In particular, Yoshiko Herrera, through Moscow, Chicago, and Boston, offered comments, support, and above all, good friendship. Thanks also to Merike Blofield, Dawn Brancati, Cora Sol Goldstein, Lara Nettelfield, Sherrill Stroschein, Tracy Regan, Nancy Scherer, and my sisters, Rachel and Michelle Giuliano.

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Finally, but not least, my family’s encouragement throughout my career made it possible for me to write this book. I am grateful to my parents Rachel and Francis Giuliano for their unstinting moral support and also for providing examples of an engaged professional life. I thank my husband, Grey Seamans, for his optimism, continuous patience and encouragement, and above all for convincing me that our newborn twins, Olivia and Simone, did not really constitute an obstacle to finishing a book. This book is dedicated to him.

1 ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURS, ORDINARY PEOPLE, AND GROUP GRIEVANCE

This era no longer wants us! This era wants to create independent nation-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations. —Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

In the late 1980s ethnonationalist movements were springing up all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Initiated by intellectuals but carried out by mass publics through protest cycles, popular referenda, and elections for independence, nationalist movements sought to gain political control of their region away from rulers they considered foreign. As the states of Eastern Europe suddenly dislodged communist rule and union republics in the Soviet Union unexpectedly acquired independent statehood, the federal integrity of the new Russian state balanced precariously. Home to sixteen autonomous republics (ARs) that were ranked just below the union republics (URs) in the USSR’s ethnoterritorial administrative hierarchy, Russia shared the same ethnofederal structure as the Soviet Union and was experiencing the same colossal upheaval.1 Entrenched ideologies were thrown to the wind, central economic planning was disassembled, and the Communist Party—with its system of political appointments at every level of state administration— disintegrated. Amid these transformations, opposition nationalist movements in the republics were attracting growing levels of popular support. When a struggle for power developed in Moscow between the proreform executive and the conservative legislature, several republics took advantage of central state weakness to accelerate their quest for sovereignty. Throughout the early 1990s the Russian Federation faced a serious threat of dissolution along ethnic lines. In nearby Yugoslavia, violent ethnic conflict and 1. Philip Roeder popularized the term “ethnofederalism” in “Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 196–233. 1

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CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE

war loomed. The Russian state, for its part, identified—and as part of the Soviet Union had itself reified over time—more than one hundred ethnic minorities. Russia also contained over twenty ethnically defined subfederal territories. An outbreak of ethnic violence there, given the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal, could have produced untold destruction. At the time, Russian leaders and Western observers alike feared that Russia would follow the disintegration of the Soviet Union along ethnic lines.2 Yet such fears were proven wrong. Within a few years ethnofederal implosion had become increasingly unlikely as nationalist separatism in Russia’s republics faded away, with the exception of the Republic of Chechnya. Why did mass publics mobilize behind nationalist movements in certain Russian republics but fail to do so in others?3 Why did some republics mount strong secessionist campaigns against Moscow while others remained quiescent? In this book I examine variation in mass nationalist mobilization and regional secessionism across Russia’s republics in order to address one of the thorniest and most undertheorized issues in the literature on nationalism: why ordinary people respond to the appeals of nationalist leaders calling for radical transformation of the status quo. There is no shortage of studies on the phenomenon of nationalist mobilization, yet most overestimate the power of ethnicity as a basis of political action. Some accounts view ethnic masses as passive actors who automatically respond to the manipulations of ethnic elites; others treat masses as highly likely to support elites when the right combination of economic and political variables is present. They view people with ethnic identities as members of ethnic groups— and ethnic groups as political actors with interests distinct from those of other actors in the same society. In this approach, ethnic groups exist in multiethnic societies as bounded, self-aware actors prior to an episode of political mobilization. Thus they respond automatically when a political entrepreneur asserts that national independence serves the interest of the group. In this view, nationalist mobilization is a relatively common outcome. Yet ethnic groups in plural societies are not simply “there.” People may come to develop a sense of solidarity with others and feel that they are part of an ethnic group, but ethnic groups are not entities in the world with a bounded set of

2. Boris Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that “the specter of discord and civil war” threatened Russia and the former USSR. Prezidentskii marafon (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AST, 2000), 62. 3. I rely on John Breuilly’s definition of a nationalist political movement as one “justifying [its] action with nationalist arguments.” A nationalist argument “is a political doctrine built upon three basic assertions: (a) There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character. (b) The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and values. (c) The nation must be as independent as possible. This usually requires at least the attainment of political sovereignty.” John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 2.

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interests.4 Because ethnic identities are socially salient categories for the subjects of study and because those subjects themselves reify ethnic groups, analysts tend to take ethnic groups as social givens; they tend to adopt their subjects’ categories as their own.5 Ethnic identities are a social reality for many people and have real effects on outcomes, but this does not mean that people with ethnic affiliations constitute a group with common interests and a sense of political destiny prior to a moment of political mobilization. Instead, a sense of “groupness”6 comes into being as a result of a political process. The process of nationalist mobilization transforms previous meanings of ethnic identity in a particular society into something that denotes a cultural community deserving control of its own state. It is political mobilization itself that makes people start to categorize themselves as being on one or another side of a group boundary and to perceive information in terms of how it affects their group.7 This means that whereas certain political and economic conditions may establish an environment that offers incentives for political leaders to play the ethnic card, mass nationalism does not automatically spring from these conditions. Rather, nationalist mobilization occurs when political and economic conditions become imbued with particular kinds of meanings at the microlevel. These meanings are not self-evident; it takes intentional action by political entrepreneurs to portray a given set of conditions in a way that connects to the lived experiences of ordinary people. Nationalist entrepreneurs must define the ethnic group that they seek to represent as an organic body that is a victim of forces beyond its control. They must attribute blame for that victimization to current circumstances or political authorities. Nationalists must articulate a position that makes the solution to the problem—establishing a nation-state—look like the only and essential way to redress group victimization and an unjust status quo. Finally, this message has to resonate with people’s lived experiences. When it does, a sense of nationhood can develop rapidly and nationalist mobilization may occur. But it is also possible, or even likely, that people who identify with a particular ethnic identity never come to see themselves as part of a victimized

4. As Rogers Brubaker states, nations should not be understood as “real entities . . . as substantial, enduring, internally homogenous and externally bounded collectivities.” See “Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism,” in The State of the Nation, ed. John A. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 292. 5. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 6. Brubaker employs this term ibid., 4. 7. As Craig Calhoun argues, “[I]dentity is not a static pre-existing condition that can be seen as exerting a causal influence on collective action; at both personal and collective levels, it is a changeable product of collective action.” “The Problem of Identity in Collective Action,” in Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology, ed. Joan Huber (London: Sage, 1991), 51.

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CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE

group. They do not place blame on other actors for conditions facing the group and thus do not view control of the state as a necessity. In this case, support for nationalism never gets off the ground. Both of these phenomena—mass nationalist mobilization and the absence of mass mobilization despite the appeals of nationalist leaders—took place in Russia’s republics. In short, mass nationalism is a political process, not a fixed set of preferences on the part of people who maintain ethnic identities. Nationalism can come and go while ethnic identities remain strong and deeply felt. In several of Russia’s republics, mass nationalism developed out of the interaction between people’s experiences in local labor markets and issue framings articulated by ethnic entrepreneurs. Nationalist entrepreneurs articulated issues about what I call ethnic economic inequality. They described obstacles to economic achievement facing members of titular ethnic groups8 by claiming that ethnic Russians held the most prestigious jobs and enjoyed access to desirable resources, while titulars were concentrated in low-status jobs or rural economies. At first glance this looks like a standard story of nationalist politics: inequality develops among communities in a given society; one community becomes aware of its subordinate position and mobilizes to rectify the inequality by establishing its own nation-state. A closer look at labor markets and Soviet state policies, however, indicates that not only did people with titular identities face relatively few obstacles to achievement, but in fact titulars had achieved considerable occupational success during the Soviet era. Thus titular nationalities in the late 1980s could be considered either subordinate to or more privileged than Russians. On the one hand, titulars were subordinate: they held a larger portion of rural agricultural jobs than ethnic Russians while Russians occupied the most prestigious positions in republican economies. On the other hand, titulars were privileged: they had undergone significant socioeconomic mobility as a result of the Soviet state’s korenizatsiia, or affirmative action policies, and had moved into urban factory jobs and white-collar positions. So economic conditions in the republics during the late glasnost period and early post-Soviet period can be (and were) interpreted in multiple ways.9 In republics where nationalist entrepreneurs articulated issues concerning ethnic economic inequality, they were able to attract a substantial degree of popular support even though their claims did not accurately portray the socioeconomic opportunities open to titular nationalities. However, in republics where nationalists focused on articulating other issues, including cultural and language

8. The term “titular” denotes the ethnic group for which the republic is named— e.g., Tatars in Tatarstan. 9. Glasnost refers to Gorbachev’s policy of intellectual openness.

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issues, they failed to win popular support. Mass nationalist mobilization took place only in those republics where nationalist entrepreneurs put forward ethnified framings of economic issues. The experience of nationalist leaders in Russia suggests that ethnic entrepreneurs face considerable constraints. They cannot easily or mechanically attract support from ordinary people who share their ethnic identity by assuming that as coethnics they have common interests. Yet at the same time, economic issues do not work mobilizational magic. There are limits to the kinds of claims nationalists can make about economic inequality. Nationalist leaders in Russia were able to attract mass support in certain republics because their framing of issues of ethnic economic inequality resonated with people’s anxieties about job insecurity in an economy undergoing severe crisis. In the late 1980s the Soviet economy entered a massive recession. Economic production began to contract throughout the country. At the same time, perestroikaera reforms introduced shortages of consumer goods, long lines for food, and the beginnings of unemployment.10 Soviet citizens who had become accustomed to state-provided educations, jobs, and occupational security in an expanding economy found the new conditions tremendously unsettling. As more citizens than ever before were obtaining education and training to work in an industrialized economy, people began to sense a tightening of labor opportunities. Massive fear of unemployment set in. Against this background, the nationalists’ story of titular underrepresentation and blocked opportunity in local economies persuaded people with titular identities to interpret their experiences and feelings of job insecurity in ethnic terms—as something related to the fortunes of the ethnic group. Nationalist entrepreneurs alleged that titulars were socioeconomically subordinate to Russians and depicted them as victims. Then they placed the blame for this situation on a discriminatory state. Finally they offered a solution by claiming that attaining republican sovereignty would eliminate oppression and restore justice.11 Nationalists connected people’s ethnic identity to their material interest in a desirable job and to their sense of self-worth concerning their socioeconomic status. They helped to define individual interests by linking personal life chances to the fate of the nation. Even though the frame of ethnic economic inequality was not entirely accurate, the fact of rising job insecurity

10. Perestroika refers to Gorbachev’s policies of economic and political restructuring. 11. The social movements literature identifies these three dimensions of victimhood, blame, and solution as critical to issue framing. See David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 137; and Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 611–39.

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CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE

in a contracting, centrally planned economy made people receptive to it. Thus a group grievance developed, crystallizing a sense of ethnic nationhood among people with titular identities and inspiring them to support the call to replace the status quo with a new, national order. The framework developed in this book focuses on how a dynamic interaction between economic structures, the experiences of ordinary people, and the discourse of political entrepreneurs produces group grievances that inspire support for nationalist transformation.

The Puzzle of Nationalism in Russia’s Republics On a campaign swing through Kazan, Tatarstan, in 1990, Boris Yeltsin told that republic’s residents, “Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.”12 At the time, demands for sovereignty were radiating from the autonomous republics inside the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to Moscow. The Soviet Union collapsed a year later, and Yeltsin, who had since become president of the new Russian Federation, inherited one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s most intractable problems. As he struggled to consolidate control of the central state, several of Russia’s republics stepped up their demands on Moscow for sovereignty. They asserted control over natural resources, defied federal laws, and introduced republican presidencies. The decisions some republics made to boycott federal elections, stop paying federal taxes, and hold referenda on “state” sovereignty lent momentum to a process that seemed likely to end in Russia’s disintegration. In several republics, opposition nationalist movements were attracting rising levels of popular support. Crowds grew at street demonstrations, the status of nationalist opposition leaders was rising, and local parliaments adopted legislation that directly challenged Moscow’s sovereignty. Nationalist organizations in some of the republics announced that they sought nothing less than independent statehood. Soon radical wings broke off from the main nationalist organizations to promote ethnically exclusivist agendas, sometimes hostile to Russians living in the republics. It looked as if an ethnic outbidding scenario was under way in which ethnic politicians would win mass support by advocating a more ethnically exclusivist program than other politicians and then, once in power, oppress ethnic minorities. Russia’s republics seemed about to transform from peaceful, multiethnic societies into ethnically divided, conflict-ridden ones. The Republic of Tatarstan was one of Russia’s most nationalist republics in the early 1990s. With its large population and relatively high level of economic 12. E. Chernobrovkina, “Reshat' vam samim” [Decide for Yourselves], Vecherniaia Kazan', August 10, 1990, 1.

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development, it was home to a very popular nationalist organization, the Tatar Public Center (TOTs), which had explicitly modeled itself on the Baltic popularfront organizations. TOTs began by calling for the protection of Tatar culture and ended up championing full independence for Tatarstan. In 1991 a radical wing broke off from TOTs and formed Ittifak (Alliance), which promoted an exclusivist nationalist agenda openly hostile to Russians in Tatarstan. As Ittifak attempted to win support away from the moderate Tatars, pro-Russian federalist groups organized in response. Ethnic outbidding by nationalist leaders was taking place, and within Tatarstan secession was being debated as a serious option. Moscow politicians feared that the separation of this republic would produce a domino effect leading to the ethnic unraveling of the fledgling federation. At one point, rumors circulated within Tatarstan that federal troops were being massed at its borders. Yet despite Tatarstan’s early and strong mass nationalist mobilization, neither ethnic outbidding nor nationalist secession ultimately took place. Popular support for the nationalist movement weakened. By the mid-1990s, Mintimir Shaimiev, a Soviet-era communist leader, born again to some extent as a Tatar nationalist, managed to consolidate control over republican politics. With the 1994 conclusion of a bilateral treaty between Tatarstan and Moscow, the republic backed away from national secession. In addition to Tatarstan, only a few of Russia’s republics—Tuva and Chechnya, and to a lesser degree Bashkortostan and Yakutia—experienced nationalist mobilization at the mass level. In other republics very little popular nationalist mobilization took place at all. Why? What can account for the short-lived development of mass nationalist mobilization in certain republics, and its virtual absence in others? This book examines these questions through both an in-depth analysis of politics in Tatarstan and a comparative analysis of Russia’s fifteen other autonomous republics. Soviet leaders had established the ARs as homelands for certain ethnic groups, although large populations of ethnic Russians lived there as well. The republics looked considerably more like states than the ethnic regions ranked lower in the Soviet Union’s administrative hierarchy—the autonomous oblasts (regions) and autonomous okrugs (districts)—because they had their own legislatures, executives, and judiciaries, as well as flags, constitutions, and some national language education.13 Also, compared with the lower-ranked ethnic territories, the ARs were allowed greater, albeit symbolic, representation in the federal government and limited rights to set local administrative policy. In this book I compare only those Russian regions that held the status of AR before 1991 in order to hold constant these factors of rights, privileges, and institutional 13. In total, twenty-six of Russia’s administrative territories were associated with particular ethnic categories, or nationalities, in Soviet parlance.

MAP 1.1

Autonomous areas in Russia

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development. I also focus on the ARs because they, like Russia’s oblasts, were politically more important than lower-level ethnic territories. Thus, I exclude republics that were elevated from autonomous oblast to republic in 1991: Adygei, Gorni Altai, Khakassia, Karachai-Cherkessia, and Ingushetia, which split off from Checheno-Ingushetia in 1992. These republics displayed very little nationalism and therefore add no variation to the original sixteen ARs. The republics analyzed in this book are depicted in Map 1.1.14

Competing Explanations of Nationalism in Russia Political scientists have devoted much attention to explaining the emergence of ethnonationalist separatism across the Soviet space, as well as its ultimate failure in Russia. Historical institutionalist explanations, for example, demonstrate how the Soviet state’s nationality policies and ethnofederal structure created ethnic elites in the republics and furnished them with identities, territories, and institutional resources that they would use to forge campaigns for autonomy against Moscow.15 Another set of studies focuses on macroeconomic factors to explain variation in nationalist separatism across the republics. In this approach, leaders of resource-rich, economically developed republics were motivated by 14. The period of nationalist mobilization analyzed in this book (1989–94) spans the Soviet Union and Russian Federation. Several of the names of the Soviet autonomous republics changed when they became republics in the Russian Federation. For clarity and consistency, I use the postSoviet names of the republics except when referring to Checheno-Ingushetia before Ingushetia separated from the republic in 1992 and when referring to the republic of Yakutia. Yakutia changed its name to the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) when it declared sovereignty in 1990. I employ the more widely known terms Yakutia and Yakuts. 15. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Svante E. Cornell, “Autonomy as a Source of Conflict: Caucasian Conflicts in Theoretical Perspective,” World Politics 54, no. 2 (January 2002): 245–76; Carol Skalnik Leff, “Democratization and Disintegration in Multinational States: The Breakup of the Communist Federations,” World Politics 51, no. 2 (January 1999): 205–35; Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, “Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia,” Deadalus 122, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 123–39; Philip Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); “Soviet Federalism,” 196–233, and “The Triumph of Nation-States: Lessons from the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia,” in After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transition, ed. Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ronald Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). Henry Hale also emphasizes institutional structure, arguing that the existence of a core ethnic region—the Russian republic—facilitated the USSR’s collapse, while the lack of a core ethnic region ensured Russia’s survival. “The Makeup and Breakup of Ethnofederal States: Why Russia Survives Where the USSR Fell,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 1 (March 2005): 55–70.

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their republics’ wealth to demand greater sovereignty, while leaders of poorer, economically dependent republics remained quiescent.16 One variant of these “wealth” hypotheses argues that the Russian Federation, unlike the Soviet Union, survived as an ethnofederal state because Moscow appeased the wealthiest, most separatist republics with economic transfers and bilateral treaties granting increased autonomy.17 Still other studies account for the weak degree of nationalism in most Russian republics by pointing to factors such as ethnic demography and the administrative status of federal regions. Demographic explanations maintain that the proportionally larger number of ethnic Russians in Russia’s republics than in the union republics made the former less likely to support nationalism.18 The administrative-status approach contends that Russia’s lowerstatus ARs had fewer privileges, rights, and ethnic institutions than the URs and thus were less likely to identify as independent states.19

16. Kisangani Emizet and Vicki Hesli, “The Disposition to Secede: An Analysis of the Soviet Case,” Comparative Political Studies 27, no. 4 (January 1995): 493–536; Daniel Treisman, “Russia’s ‘Ethnic Revival’: The Separatist Activism of Regional Leaders in a Postcommunist Order,” World Politics 49 (January 1997): 212–49; Henry Hale, “The Parade of Sovereignties: Testing Theories of Secession in the Soviet Setting,” British Journal of Political Science 30 (2000): 31–56; Henry Hale and Rein Taagepera, “Russia: Consolidation or Collapse?” Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 7 (November 2002): 1101–25; Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, “Federalism and Regionalism,” in Developments in Russian Politics 4, ed. Stephen White, Alex Pravda, and Zvi Gitelman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 239; James Hughes, “From Federalism to Recentralization,” Developments in Russian Politics 5, ed. Stephen White, Alex Pravda, and Zvi Gitelman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 134. For a new, more nuanced approach that emphasizes the importance of regions’ assessments of the risks and benefits of integration versus separation see Henry Hale, The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 17. Steven Solnick, “Will Russia Survive? Center and Periphery in the Russian Federation,” in Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and State-Building, ed. Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder (London: Routledge, 1998), 58–80; Mikhail Alexseev, “Decentralization Versus State Collapse: Explaining Russia’s Endurance,” Journal of Peace Research 38, no. 1 (2001 ): 101–6; Daniel Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 18. Gail Lapidus and Edward W. Walker, “Nationalism, Regionalism, and Federalism: CenterPeriphery Relations in Post-Communist Russia,” in The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, ed. Gail Lapidus (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 79–113; Gail Lapidus, “Asymmetrical Federalism and State Breakdown in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 15, no. 1 (1999): 74–82. Also see Hughes “From Federalism to Recentralization,” 131–34. 19. Mikhail A. Alexseev, “Asymmetric Russia: Promises and Dangers,” in Center-Periphery Conflict in Post-Soviet Russia: A Federation Imperiled, ed. Mikhail A. Alexseev (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 247–79; Lapidus, “Asymmetrical Federalism,” 75; Hale, “Parade of Sovereignties,” 48–49; Treisman, “Russia’s ‘Ethnic Revival,’” 229–30. In a different vein, Stephen Hanson argues that the ideological shift from Marxism-Leninism to democracy as the Russian Federation formed made it harder for people in Russia’s republics to oppose Moscow than during the Soviet era. He also argues that secessionism in Russia was hampered by a lack of support from international actors, especially the United States. “Ideology, Interests, and Identity: Comparing the Soviet and Russian Secession Crises,” in Alexseev, Center-Periphery Conflict, 15–46.

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Although most of these explanations have advanced our understanding, they share three main shortcomings. First, many studies focus on the presence or absence of structural variables, arguing that the right combination of variables or the correct set of economic and political conditions will spark mass nationalism. This approach reifies ethnic groups and overestimates the likelihood of nationalist mobilization. Second, most accounts focus almost exclusively on elite actors and especially on the role of regional leaders. They valuably delineate how regional leaders manipulated ethnic identify for strategic reasons yet assume that these leaders acted autonomously within the republics and fomented mass nationalism to strengthen their negotiating position with Moscow. In this view, leaders act strategically while masses act out of a sincere commitment to nationalism—an approach that essentializes ethnic populations. Third, few studies sufficiently account for empirical variation in levels of separatism across all the ethnic republics of either the Russian Federation or the Soviet Union.20 Studies that focus on structural economic and political variables to explain empirical variation fail to recognize how the massive political transformations occurring at the time affected both mass and elite actors within the republics and therefore republican relations with Moscow. They overlook how popular mobilization in certain republics pressured regional leaders and drove secessionist campaigns toward Moscow.21 Finally, virtually no existing studies offer a comparative account of the rise of mass nationalism across all the republics, though ethnic politics continues to be a central issue in Russia.22 Much of this critique is not unique to post-Soviet politics. Generally, in analyses of multiethnic societies, observers tend to naturalize the existence of bounded ethnic groups and view them as easily triggered into political action along ethnic lines. Though most observers now recognize the constructed origins of ethnic groups, some erroneously treat these groups as coherent actors moving forward through time from the moment of their “construction,” typically thought to have occurred in the early twentieth century. My argument in this book, by contrast, is that people with ethnic affiliations do not constitute an interest group that endures over time. 20. I provide evidence for each of these claims in chapter 2. 21. I elaborate on this point in chapter 7. Some accounts also assume that the union republics were more nationalist than the ARs, when actually popular support for nationalism was stronger in certain Russian republics than in Belarus and Central Asia. 22. An important exception is Mark Beissinger’s study that addresses variation in nationalist mobilization in the ARs, although it focuses principally on the union republics of the USSR. Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Dmitry Gorenburg examines mass nationalism in Russia but concentrates on explaining the origins of mobilization in four republics. See Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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In Russia, people with Russian and titular identities were not separate, selfenclosed communities who got along at some points in time and came into conflict at others. Like most ethnically heterogeneous societies around the world, Russian republics were not societies divided along ethnic lines. To assert that boundaries enclosing ethnic groups are porous and blurry means, first, that individual “members” of ethnic groups have many experiences in common with “members” of other groups. For example, titulars and Russians attended the same schools, lived in the same neighborhoods,23 and shopped for the same consumer goods.24 They worked in the same factories,25 traveled to work on the same public transportation, and listened to the same state-controlled media. In the cities of most republics, linguistic differences did not reinforce a boundary between Russians and titulars since many titulars had learned Russian by the 1970s and 1980s.26 Second, porous group boundaries allow members of ethnic groups to maintain other kinds of social identities besides ethnicity. Soviet citizens were categorized, for example, by class and profession, gender, region of birth, generation, and Communist Party membership. They identified variously as World War II veterans; shestidesyatniki, or members of the 1960s generation; odnokursniki, or classmate cohort; and rural dweller—an important social category in Soviet society.27 Rural dwellers themselves held multiple identities, some of which overlapped with ethnicity (village of birth; te'ip, or clan, in the Caucasus; linguistic and religious affiliation) and some of which did not (kolkhozniki, or state farm workers; teachers, doctors, or other representatives of the creative intelligentsia; and religious affiliation). Additionally, in the late 1980s, glasnost offered people new kinds of identities: environmentalist, feminist, antinuclear activist, democrat, and of course nationalist. The fact that Soviet citizens with ethnic affiliations had multiple identities and shared many experiences with Russians and others does not mean that they had assimilated to a Soviet nation (Sovetskii narod). Ethnicity was socially salient, and generally people were aware of one another’s ethnic affiliations—even

23. For example, even in the so-called Tatar neighborhood of Kazan, Russians, Tatars, and other nationalities lived side by side. That designation referred to the distant past when Tatars lived and worshipped at mosques there. 24. There were exceptions in rural regions in certain republics where titulars lived in concentrated numbers. However, in most rural areas in most republics, Russians lived alongside titulars. 25. Soviet work collectives generally were not divided along ethnic lines. Exceptions consisted of specialized institutions created to promote titular art, knowledge, and culture and some shops in the cities where titular clerks worked after migrating from rural areas. 26. There is some variation on this dimension among Russia’s republics—a subject I address in chapter 3. 27. Rural dwellers were sometimes referred to as representatives of “a different culture.” Field notes, Kazan, Tatarstan, 1997. I discuss rural identity and culture in chapter 3.

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when physical appearance or linguistic and cultural practices did not obviously mark differences. In many places people held stereotyped views of minority nationalities, and marriage across ethnic boundaries rarely occurred. In short, ethnicity was felt, recognized by others, and expressed in various ways, a fact that demonstrated the success of the Soviet state in constructing and reifying ethnic categories. But this does not mean that titulars and Russians experienced political and economic conditions differently. Thus an exogenous event like the opening of political opportunity that took place during glasnost or a dramatic downturn in the economy did not cause titulars to suddenly realize that they were subjugated and could “do better” in a sovereign state. In other words, structural conditions shape individuals’ experiences and emotions but do not spontaneously establish ethnic groups with systematically opposed interests and preferences. A sense of groupness comes into being as a result of the process of political mobilization itself. Mobilization transforms the meaning of ethnic identity in a particular society into a shared sense of nationhood defined by a belief that the nation deserves to control its own state. People start to categorize themselves as being part of a nation and to perceive information in terms of how it affects that nation. As a result, support for nationalism develops. A sense of groupness or nationhood, however, is fragile and can rapidly fall apart.

Why Ordinary People Respond to Nationalist Leaders Nationalism entails a radical reordering of society and state; it “redefines the nature of legitimate political authority,” in Breuilly’s words.28 Nationalist movements seek to mobilize the masses behind a new national community with new political leadership. Thus nationalist mobilization means that people act in opposition to something—the ethnic other, the central state, or the current political order. In order to act against, people must have a strong sense of grievance, or resentment and dissatisfaction concerning important aspects of their present situation. A grievance may be described as the feeling of having been wronged, as distinguished from the actual or supposed circumstances, acts, or events that are believed responsible for that feeling. Several influential theories of political mobilization assume that group grievances directly reflect objective economic and political conditions, historical

28. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 25.

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events, or other social structures, and therefore they do not analyze the formation of those grievances. Social scientists have focused much attention, for example, on economic inequality as the basis of group grievance and people’s desire for sovereign statehood.29 Ernst Gellner points to the effect of uneven modernization on groups that are culturally different from the economically dominant or state-bearing population.30 Michael Hechter shows how internal colonialism and a cultural division of labor raise people’s awareness of discrimination and central state economic exploitation.31 Resource competition theorists argue that industrialization encourages competition for common resources such as jobs, which increases group solidarity among cultural minorities.32 Recent accounts of nationalism in Russia that emphasize the variable of republican wealth make the same kind of argument: that the uneven distribution of economic resources in society arouses discontent, inspiring groups to support nationalism.33 More broadly, recent research on rebellion and ethnic civil war also views grievances as a direct response to objective conditions in society but discounts their causal influence in motivating rebel leaders and their followers.34 Crossnational studies by Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, David Laitin, and Jim Fearon measure grievance by observing the presence of specific structural factors such as income inequality, autocracy, and state regulation of religious activity.35 This

29. Political science has a long tradition of explaining mass mobilization in general by emphasizing economic adversity. For example, Samuel Huntington argued that inequitable land ownership and poverty produce suffering and discontent, which lead to peasant revolution in Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 375. Also see Edward N. Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson, “Inequality and Insurgency,” American Political Science Review 81 (1987): 425–52. 30. See Ernst Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964) and Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 31. Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), and “Group Formation and the Cultural Division of Labor,” American Journal of Sociology 84 (1978): 293–318. Similarly, Donald Horowitz made strong claims about the likelihood of a backward group in a backward region to secede. Horowitz, “Patterns of Ethnic Separatism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 165–95, and Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 32. Francois Nielsen, “Toward a Theory of Ethnic Solidarity in Modern Societies” American Sociological Review 50 (1985): 133–49, and “The Flemish Movement in Belgium after World War II: A Dynamic Analysis,” American Sociological Review 45 (1980): 76–94. 33. See Emizet and Hesli, “The Disposition to Secede,” Treisman, “Russia’s ‘Ethnic Revival,’ ” and Hale, “Parade of Sovereignties.” I discuss these accounts in chapter 2. 34. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 79; Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (October 2004): 563–95. 35. For example, Collier uses the Gini coefficient as a proxy measure of the grievance of income inequality and whether a state is an autocracy as a proxy measure of political repression in examining 161 states with 78 civil wars. Collier and Hoeffler, 570–72. Fearon and Laitin conceptualize grievance as resentment produced by state discrimination and measure it using state regulation of religious and

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approach treats grievance as both objective structures and people’s attitudes about those structures without considering what people themselves make of conditions in their society.36 The authors find that the structural factors (i.e., grievances) are present in many states and are not correlated with rebellion. They therefore conclude that since all societies have groups with grievances, it is not the grievances that explain mass mobilization.37 Their investigations turn away from analyzing grievance and toward other explanations. Resource mobilization theory makes similar assumptions about grievances, viewing discontent and psychological alienation as constants that help to motivate mass mobilization or social movement participation. Since resource mobilization theory considers grievances background conditions, it focuses analytical attention on how access to resources, organizational skills, and the political opportunity structure influences mobilization.38 These accounts devote little analytical attention to grievances because they assume that people react in an unmediated way to inegalitarian economic realities. They assume that people who are subject to, for example, economic inequality or political exclusion perceive their situation the way an outside observer would. Conceptualizing grievance in this way ignores the content of mass beliefs and attitudes or worse, accepts statements made by nationalist leaders as direct representations of mass attitudes.39 It fails to observe how the people in a given society missionary activity and state denial of official recognition to minority languages, as well as the Gini coefficient to indicate income inequality. Fearon and Laitin, Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War, 79. 36. Paul Collier, “Doing Well out of War: An Economic Perspective,” in Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, ed. Mats R. Berdal and David M. Malone(Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 91–111. 37. David Laitin argues elsewhere that latent ethnic grievances do motivate insurgents toward violent rebellion against the state but only when they become “vital and manifest.” Grievances exist in latent form everywhere, he argues (e.g., resentments or hatreds among Russian speakers in both Transdniestria in Moldova and northeast Estonia) but only sometimes are associated with ethnic violence. It is the various effects of central state weakness that cause latent grievances to become manifest and spark ethnic violence. See Laitin, Nations, States, and Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 1. 38. See Craig J. Jenkins and Charles Perrow, “Insurgency of the Powerless: Farm Worker Movements (1964–1972),” American Sociological Review 42 (1977): 249–68; John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 1212–41; Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973); and Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1978), cited in David Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review, 51, no. 4 (August 1986): 464–81. 39. Ted Gurr’s relative deprivation framework—though it recognizes that the existence of economic deprivation does not always produce a perception of inequality among people— codes the presence of group grievance by observing statements made by movement leaders. See Gurr and United States Institute of Peace, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993), 61, 68–72; Gurr, Peoples versus States:

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actually understand the conditions in which they find themselves and thus overestimates or miscalculates the likelihood of mass nationalism. Inequality and hierarchy among collectivities are ubiquitous; events occur, and economic, political, and social arrangements exist in most societies that outside observers would characterize as unequal and unjust. But do people living in those societies also see their situation in this way? There are many places with impoverished groups and highly inegalitarian conditions where people do not feel that things have become intolerable, do not blame the state or another group, and do not mobilize for change.40 Group grievances, in other words, do not unproblematically arise from all manner of structurally unequal conditions. To assume that aggrieved groups are found everywhere that inequalities exist “avoids the enormous variability in the subjective meanings people attach to their objective situations.”41 In order to understand why group grievances develop that inspire support for nationalism, we need to know more than the objective political and economic conditions that leave certain people disadvantaged. We need to know how actors themselves—both mass and elite—understand their situation. People do not have automatic, unmediated understandings of economic and political conditions, historical events, or other social structures. There are numerous ways in which they may interpret a given set of circumstances in their society. The argument that there are multiple interpretations of economic and political realities is not a new one. Social theorists have long argued that experience cannot be apprehended apart from interpretation. The constructivist turn in the nationalism literature has focused on how elites construct a nationalist discourse around invented national histories and symbolic events.42 Social movement theorists have shown how movement leaders frame ideas to influence mass behavior.43 But few studies of nationalism have investigated how economic

Minorities at Risk in the New Century (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2000); and Gurr and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 24. 40. Assimilation rather than mobilization by poor, discriminated-against minority immigrants in the United States suggests just one example. 41. Social movements theorists Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes,” 465–66, make this criticism of the resource mobilization approach. 42. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Breuilly, Nationalism and the State; M. Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), and “The National and Colonial Question and Marxism: A View from the South,” in Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities, ed. Alexander Motyl, 67–97 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: Norton, 2000). 43. For example, see Mayer N. Zald, “Culture, Ideology and Strategic Framing,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, ed. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 262–74.

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conditions and structures are themselves subject to interpretation by ordinary people and elites. Thus they miss an opportunity to investigate how elite framing of economic conditions shapes mass-level group grievances that create a sense of nationhood.44 How, then, do ethnic grievances develop? I argue that they are constructed through an interactive process between elite actors and ordinary people in which elites imbue economic conditions and structures with ethnic meanings. Ethnic entrepreneurs depict economic conditions as unfairly consigning people with ethnic identities to a subordinate position in society. They place blame for that inequality on current political authorities, and they suggest that the solution to the injustice entails acquiring state sovereignty or independence. Ordinary people, however, are not automatically convinced by elite declarations that conditions in their society are unequal and discriminate against a particular ethnic group. Rather, they begin to view economic inequalities in ethnic terms when the particular way in which an issue is framed resonates with experiences that concern their occupations, social mobility, and socioeconomic status. Why are these kinds of experiences in particular related to ethnic grievance and political mobilization? Jobs, professional mobility, and socioeconomic status fundamentally concern individuals’ material interests and, in the context of late-twentieth-century industrialized society, their sense of self-worth. Many people around the world care deeply about these forms of self-interest. Thus they are likely to be receptive to a framing of local economic conditions that links personal material achievement to the fate of the ethnic nation. Nationalist entrepreneurs—in claiming that current conditions do not offer equal economic opportunity to the ethnic nation—convey to individuals that they are denied material success because of their ethnic identity. Nationalists argue that the future life chances of individuals will be determined by whether the existing order can be replaced with one in which their group faces no obstacles to socioeconomic achievement. An ethnic grievance develops when people with ethnic identities come to share the belief that the economic inequality the nationalists describe exists and harms them personally because of their ethnic affiliation. Can ethnic entrepreneurs construct group grievances that are utterly divorced from objective conditions? I argue that the answer to this is no; there are limits to the creative abilities of elites. If a large empirical disconnect exists between people’s experiences and elites’ descriptions of ethnic economic inequalities, individuals will not be convinced that their personal interests are tied up with the

44. This is not true of Mark Beissinger’s framework, which emphasizes human agency and event, as well as preexisting structures to explain the contingent nature of mass nationalism. See Nationalist Mobilization.

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position of the ethnic group, and the nationalists’ narrative will seem an irrelevant (or even ridiculous) depiction of local conditions. Nationalists will lose credibility, and group grievances will fail to emerge. Therefore, both the kinds of issues entrepreneurs articulate and the way in which they frame those issues matter to the construction of group grievance because the issues must plausibly map onto central experiences in people’s lives. As with economic issues, if elites describe inequality and discrimination related to religious or cultural issues associated with an ethnic minority, people will not necessarily respond unless those issues map onto some aspect of their lived experiences. In Russia’s republics, given the particular legacies of Soviet secularization, cultural homogenization, and Russification, issues of economic inequality were generally more likely to resonate with a greater number of citizens than were those concerning the denial of religious and cultural rights.45 The fact that nationalist leaders cannot automatically attract support by describing just any issue as an instance of ethnic discrimination drains them of some of the power they are often thought to exert over ethnic masses. It also suggests that nationalists should not necessarily be viewed as exclusively strategic actors, cynically manipulating issues that they know will evoke a response. They often earnestly believe in the ideas they articulate and communicate them to the masses as sincere descriptions of the way they understand societal conditions. In Russia, nationalist leaders acted both expressively and strategically. Ethnic entrepreneurs in the republics perceived titulars to be subordinate to Russians in local labor markets and overlooked titular mobility for several reasons. First, as titulars, nationalists could base their understanding of current conditions on their interpretation of their own family history. They could think about their own, their parents’, or their grandparents’ background growing up in the countryside and working on the land, and they often still had relatives living and working in rural regions. If they did not know any rural Russians, they might assume that all Russians came from an urban background. Furthermore, in many though not all republics, Russians occupied more blue-collar factory jobs than titulars who tended to work in nonindustrial settings. According to Soviet norms, industry was viewed as higher status than most other spheres of the economy. So even if titulars did not choose to work as an assembly line worker, for example, it is likely that they viewed such work as more prestigious than nonindustrial jobs requiring similar education and training. Second, ethnic entrepreneurs, many of whom were intellectuals, may have been predisposed to view the central state—i.e., Moscow and the Communist Party—in negative 45. I elaborate on this point in chapter 2 and describe various kinds of ethnic issues articulated by nationalists in subsequent chapters.

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terms, like intellectuals living throughout the USSR in the late Soviet era. Therefore, ethnic entrepreneurs could not recognize or appreciate the beneficial effects of the state’s economic policies, such as affirmative action and titular mobility. Finally, in most cases ethnic entrepreneurs came from the highly educated stratum of society. As professionals, they cared deeply about occupational status and achievement. It is not surprising that they considered issues of professional representation crucial to the current and future position of the ethnic group. In fact, the nationalists’ attention to issues of economic inequality reveals just how much they were products of the very Soviet state whose authority they were trying to undermine. Their focus on pragmatic issues of professional mobility, equal ethnic group representation, and individual advancement reproduced typical late-Soviet-era ideals. They saw no contradiction in asserting the right to a nation-state in order to realize the goods of modernity as defined by the Soviet state. Like all nationalists, they drew on a range of extant beliefs and practices to construct an idea of national community deserving control of the state. They believed in the ideas that they articulated, understanding them to be accurate and fair descriptions of existing conditions. As sincere and committed actors, the nationalists did not necessarily understand what caused ordinary people to respond to their programs and thus did not strategically choose to focus on one issue frame rather than another. In short, the issues they chose to put forward reflected their worldview and thus involved a good deal of contingency. Group grievances in Russia developed quickly as part of a contingent process of political mobilization. The longevity of a grievance among a population, often seen as an indication of intensity, is immaterial. What matters is how political entrepreneurs infuse meaning into people’s current experience of social conditions and connect that meaning to the pressing need to challenge political authority. Grievances were no less intensely held by ethnic groups in the republics because they emerged in the space of a few brief years. My argument contributes to the current framework in political science that emphasizes a disconnect between structural conditions and people’s perceptions of the economy. This insight— developed in recent work by Yoshiko Herrera and Rawi Abdelal, for example—shifts our focus away from explaining political outcomes using exogenous economic and other structural factors and toward examining how people’s economic interests develop out of intersubjective understandings in particular sociopolitical contexts.46 My approach differs from

46. Herrera’s book finds that regionalist movements developed in several Russian oblasts in the early 1990s when oblast residents developed certain understandings of their regions’ economic interests—understandings that were not based in existing material conditions. In Abdelal’s framework, national identity explains why Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus chose divergent foreign

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Herrera’s by emphasizing that in order for people to respond to elite programs, elite framings cannot be utterly divorced from actual conditions. By focusing on the particular way in which nationalists use ethnic frames to interpret economic conditions, I provide a mechanism that connects economic structures to group identity and the cohesion of ethnic group interests in support of nationalism.

How Nationalist Grievances Developed in Russia In Russian republics with significant mass mobilization, nationalist entrepreneurs articulated issues in such a way as to draw boundaries between people with titular and Russian identities. Nationalists claimed that Moscow denied titular nationalities full participation in republican economies by blocking access to desirable jobs and resources. Titulars worked in low-status professions in rural economies, they argued, while Russians enjoyed unrestricted access to higher education and the best jobs. This argument characterized titulars as unjustly second-rate within their own republics. Nationalist entrepreneurs tried to stoke a sense of outrage among people with ethnic identities by articulating the ways in which economic inequalities had turned them into victims. They then placed blame for the titulars’ inferior status on current economic conditions and existing political authorities. Only by replacing the current order with a new one in which titulars controlled the state, they argued, could this injustice be rectified. Thus nationalists linked titular group identity to their critical objective: achieving republican sovereignty. Sovereignty, a concept whose meaning was not self-evident, denoted a range of possibilities and in some cases changed over time from increased regional autonomy to outright secession. Nationalist leaders agreed, however, that they could not wait for Moscow to bestow sovereignty upon the republics; they would have to seize it themselves. It is critical to note that the nationalists’ message of titular economic subordination vis-à-vis Russians did not directly reflect the position of titular populations in republican economies. Although titulars began the twentieth century lagging behind Russians socioeconomically, they took advantage of korenizatsiia policies and made enormous strides in professional achievement, especially in the decades after World War II. By the end of the Soviet era, titulars worked beside Russians in factories, economic management, and government administration.

economic policies after 1991 despite their common economic dependence on Russia. See Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Abdelal, National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

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An ethnic division of labor among Russians and titulars in the republics, to the degree that it had ever existed, was breaking down. On the other hand, there was a kernel of reality in the nationalists’ message: titulars were to some extent still underrepresented in white-collar jobs in republican urban economies by comparison with Russians. But the nationalists, by presenting a snapshot of socioeconomic conditions as of 1989 rather than describing gains made by titulars over time, could build a convincing case for ethnic inequality. So which view was accurate—titular subordination or titular opportunity and achievement? Both were. I argue that there were multiple legitimate interpretations of conditions in the republics in the late Soviet era. But nationalist leaders could not make a convincing case for state sovereignty by recognizing and thanking the Soviet state for advancing the socioeconomic position of their ethnic group. Instead, they described economic inequality in order to emphasize the victimization of titulars and to appeal for state sovereignty to eradicate that oppression. The nationalist framing of issues of ethnic economic inequality resonated with the experiences that many people were having at that time. When nationalists described the economic subordination of titulars vis-à-vis Russians in republican economies, many titulars responded because it helped them to make sense of growing competition for jobs and their fears about social mobility in a deteriorating, state-controlled economy. In republics where nationalists articulated issues of ethnic economic inequality, popular support for nationalism developed. Ordinary people with ethnic affiliations responded to nationalist leaders not because their group was objectively socioeconomically subordinate to Russians and angry about it. Titular ethnic groups did not have preexisting economic grievances. They responded because the nationalists’ claim of ethnic economic subordination provided people with an explanation for their experiences and anxieties at the time. The macroeconomic decline that had begun in the Brezhnev era of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated under Gorbachev. Long-term trends in the Soviet Union including urbanization, industrialization, and public education produced growing numbers of people pursuing higher education and good jobs. Then, in the late 1980s, economic production began to contract sharply. People spent hours waiting in lines as food and consumer goods became increasingly scarce. At the same time, Gorbachev’s glasnost policies were igniting rapid and transformative change. In 1991 when Yeltsin suddenly freed prices that had remained state-controlled and static for decades, the cost of goods skyrocketed. Amid great economic and political uncertainty, people deeply feared unemployment. They doubted that the state could continue to provide them and their families with educations, secure careers, and professional advancement. Since all people

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were in the same listing boat, there is no reason why individuals with ethnic affiliations would necessarily have perceived these experiences as related to their ethnicity rather than to a shortage of opportunity for everyone. But ethnic entrepreneurs, by describing ethnic economic inequality, channeled these fears in an ethnic direction. The nationalist issue frame of ethnic economic inequality seemed plausible to people. Even if educated titulars did not personally occupy a subordinate position in the labor market, they could accept the veracity of an ethnic division of labor by thinking about the current precariousness of their position, as well as their family history in which parents or grandparents lived as uneducated manual laborers in the countryside. The nationalists’ description of ethnic economic inequality was not a phenomenon dreamed up out of the blue but based on an accurate description of past inequalities among rural and urban populations in Russia, though not necessarily among titulars and Russians. Nationalist entrepreneurs also offered a target of blame—current political authority—as well as a solution to concerns about life chances: achieving sovereignty by capturing the state. Nationalist leaders, in other words, politicized ethnicity by convincing people to connect personal material interests to one of their social identities—ethnicity. They persuaded them that their personal life chances depended on the political fate of their ethnic community. Nevertheless, there were limits to the influence of nationalist leaders, even when they employed an ethnic economic inequality frame. First, not all people with titular identities in the republics were convinced by the nationalist message. Even in those republics with high mass nationalist mobilization, large numbers of titulars simply remained agnostic about nationalist sovereignty, and others opposed it. As research on preference formation in American politics has found, elites do not have unqualified latitude in using frames to manipulate mass opinion.47 Ultimately, in most republics, group grievances that produced a sense of nationhood did not endure. Dramatic changes in economic and political conditions during the early years of the Russian Federation gave people new experiences. It can be argued that these experiences reduced the plausibility of the nationalists’ claim that people’s personal life chances were connected to the political status of their ethnic group. Specifically, the end of the Soviet system of central economic planning ended the state’s monopoly over the distribution of jobs. Economic liberalization began to transform the labor market. More and more people, es-

47. James N. Druckman and Arthur Lupia, “Preference Formation” American Political Science Review 3 (2000): 1–24; James N. Druckman, “The Implications of Framing Effects for Citizen Competence,” Political Behavior 23, no. 3 (September 2001): 225–56.

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pecially those with higher education, found new paths to professional mobility outside the state sector. Moreover, the emerging private sector, for the most part, did not take people’s ethnicity into account as the Soviet state had with its affirmative action policies. Thus, job allocation changed from an ethnicized process directed by the state to a decentralized process involving a variety of decision makers uninterested in using ethnicity as an allocative rule.48 Overall, these developments related to economic liberalization diminished the relevance of the nationalist message about the presence of, and need to remedy, ethnic economic inequality. The supposedly subordinate status of the ethnic group mattered less to people in an economy in which the state did not have the sole power to determine socioeconomic mobility. Thus, capturing the state in the name of the ethnic group—the raison d’être of nationalist movements— became less urgent. As a result, popular support for nationalism declined in most of Russia’s republics as the 1990s progressed. The case of Russia, with its fluctuating and ultimately failed mobilizations, illustrates the point that nationalist mobilization occurs less frequently than is generally thought. Nationalist leaders do not possess some kind of unqualified capacity to “convert” ordinary people into nationalists by channeling socioeconomic grievances that already exist among the masses. Nor do nationalists attract support by making people aware of socioeconomic inequities that structure their lives. As Breuilly argues, “Nationalist ideology matters, not so much because it directly motivates most supporters of a nationalist movement, but rather because it provides a conceptual map which enables people to relate their particular material and moral interests to a broader terrain of action.”49 The fact of nationalist demobilization and the ultimate demise of the nationalist movements in Russia points to the limits of the influence political entrepreneurs have in shaping people’s perceptions and political behavior. Overall, my theoretical framework for understanding the relationship of ethnicity to politics joins a growing consensus among social scientists that views ethnic identities in constructivist terms and argues that ethnic affiliations do not easily translate into nationalist mobilization.50 48. Viktoria Koroteeva, Ekonomicheskie interesy i natsionalizm [Economic Interests and Nationalism](Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2000). 49. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 13. 50. For an excellent statement of this position see V. P. Gagnon Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). David Laitin also emphasizes the challenges ethnic entrepreneurs face in mobilizing people in Nations, States, and Violence, as does Mark Beissinger in “Nationalisms That Bark and Nationalisms That Bite: Ernest Gellner and the Substantiation of Nations,” in Hall, State of the Nation, 169–90. Also see Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), and Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.

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Implications for Understanding Nationalism and Ethnic Politics This book offers a comparative analysis of the rise of ethnonationalism across Russia’s sixteen republics. The enormous variation among the republics despite their common history, political and economic institutions, and shared experience of turbulent change during the Soviet transition presents an interesting set of puzzles. The republics offer a set of conditions that allow us to hold many factors constant in examining these puzzles. Therefore, a systematic comparison of cases characterized by an absence of mass nationalist mobilization justifies a sustained focus on a set of substate regions that rarely make international headlines.51 Examining the rise of ethnic nationalism also provides new information about how the transition from communist rule proceeded within each subfederal region. Greater insight into political processes within the regions can shed light on present-day politics in the Russian Federation, where relations between the center and region continue to be characterized by a very unstable equilibrium. Finally, the theoretical framework developed in this book has important implications for the broader issue of how identity influences political behavior. This issue is a critical one for policymakers working in multiethnic societies to understand in order to avoid promoting policies that view people with ethnic identities as automatic supporters of nationalist politicians. The Russian Federation offers a fitting context in which to study nationalism because it has experienced relatively little violence by comparison with other cases such as Yugoslavia and the states of the Caucasus. Violence tends to reify ethnic groups as political actors and harden the boundaries between groups. People who do not perceive information or condition their behavior on ethnic distinctions will often begin to do so after being attacked by a perpetrator who justifies that attack on ethnic grounds.52 A majority of scholarly studies have focused on multiethnic societies where violence has broken out and group identities have hardened. Yet by examining only these cases, analysts cannot make sense of why people who live in multiethnic societies where ethnicity is socially salient do not mobilize in support of nationalism.53 By examining Russia, this book presents a corrective to bias in the cases usually selected for analysis and thus provides insight into the general phenomena of nationalism and ethnic politics. 51. Rogers Brubaker has called for research on the “weakness of nationalism in certain regions” of the former Soviet Union. “Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism,” 283. 52. For example, residents of Chechnya, who did not see themselves as part of a national community distinct from other Soviet citizens, began to do so after Moscow decided to bomb cities in Chechnya. 53. James Fearon and David Laitin argue that case selection bias in studies of violent ethnic conflict leads analysts to overpredict the likelihood of ethnic violence. See “Explaining Interethnic Cooperation,” American Political Science Review 90 (December 1996): 715.

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Finally, the findings of this book challenge the idea—put forward in several major political science studies and commonly found in the media—that states undergoing a transition to democracy produce ethnic mobilization and ethnic violence, especially when those states are multiethnic and postcolonial. Transitions from authoritarian rule, to be sure, weaken the central state and shatter existing institutions, thereby creating opportunities for counterelites and opposition figures to mobilize people. Yet there is no a priori reason why ethnicity will be the cleavage along which such mobilizations take place. The supposed incompatibility of democracy and ethnic pluralism is an assumption that results from the failure of many analysts to theorize why ethnic masses follow elites. For example, Jon Elster, Claus Offe, and Ulrich Preuss claim that democratic institutions—such as political parties, free media, and elections—allow polarized groups to introduce fear, distrust, and repression into plural societies and that these in turn engender ethnonationalism and ethnic violence.54 Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield maintain that the lack of institutions of democratic accountability in states transitioning from authoritarian rule creates electoral incentives for politicians to mobilize citizens using exclusivist nationalist appeals. Nationalism, Snyder states, is an “easy” and “effective” way to build popular support among a mass public.55 I demonstrate, on the contrary, that appeals to nationalism are actually a highly unreliable way for elites to attract popular support. Would-be nationalist leaders in Russia’s republics faced significant difficulties in mobilizing ethnic populations despite the presence of conditions—at the international, state, and individual levels—that would seem to have inspired a demand for independent statehood. Individuals with ethnic identities neither automatically nor routinely become nationalist at the command of ethnic entrepreneurs. I find instead that it is possible for individuals to genuinely and intensely identify with a particular ethnicity but neither automatically support a nationalist program nor respond to nationalist elites’ appeals for statehood or the subjugation of an ethnic other. The analysis of politics in Russia’s sixteen republics demonstrates how difficult it is for nationalist leaders to attract popular support. Once we recognize that ethnic entrepreneurs cannot manipulate coethnics at will, the phenomena of nationalist mobilization and ethnic conflict will become more susceptible to policy solutions. 54. Jon Elster, Claus Offe, and Ulrich K. Preuss, Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 250, 252, 254. 55. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 2005 ); Snyder, From Voting to Violence; and Jack Snyder, “Problems of Democratic Transition in Divided Societies,” in Domestic Perspectives on Contemporary Democracy, ed. Peter F. Nardulli, 15 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

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Plan of the Book In chapter 2 I briefly describe the emergence of opposition nationalist movements in Russia’s republics. Then I define the dependent variable of the study by coding Russia’s sixteen republics in terms of the level of mass support for nationalism in each of them. This establishes the striking difference in levels of mass nationalism across the republics. The third section of the chapter critically evaluates explanations of nationalist mobilization in the literature on post-Soviet politics in terms of both their logic and their empirical predictions. I systematically evaluate these arguments against evidence from Russia and find that they do not offer sufficient explanations for the emergence of nationalist mobilization or its variance across republics. In chapter 3, I consider whether adverse economic conditions in republican labor markets at the end of the Soviet era inspired popular support for nationalism. I evaluate the claims of nationalist leaders who maintained that titular minorities were socioeconomically subordinate to Russians within their republics. First, I outline socioeconomic mobility in each of the sixteen republics by presenting Soviet state statistical data on population growth, urbanization, linguistic Russification, education, and occupational representation and find that the data do not present a clear-cut picture. On the one hand titular populations in all republics demonstrated social mobility; on the other hand, they lagged behind Russians at the end of the Soviet era. This finding suggests that nationalist leaders and ordinary people interpreted economic conditions in various ways. I analyze the data to evaluate whether these conditions by themselves could have directly produced a group grievance that led to nationalist mobilization. I test whether two different economic structures—interethnic job competition and an ethnic division of labor—are correlated with nationalism in Russia’s republics and find that they are not. These results suggest that structural economic variables alone cannot explain variation in nationalism across the republics. Chapter 4 shifts to a microlevel investigation of processes that produced mass nationalism in one of Russia’s most nationalist republics—Tatarstan. I demonstrate how Tatar nationalists constructed an ethnonational grievance that produced mass support for Tatar nationalism. First I show that social mobility for Tatars rose throughout the Soviet era, as did their representation in urban labor markets. Next I describe how Tatar ethnic entrepreneurs framed issues of Tatar occupational underrepresentation vis-à-vis Russians in order to characterize Tatars as socioeconomically subordinate and as victims within their own republic. This framing allowed nationalists to attract support to a program that called for replacing an inegalitarian status quo with state sovereignty.

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In chapter 5 I analyze why Tatarstan’s second largest city, Naberezhnye Chelny, experienced a greater level of nationalist mobilization than the capital city of Kazan. The majority of the residents of Naberezhnye Chelny were employed by a single state enterprise: the Kamskii Automobile Works, or KamAZ, where Russians held a greater percentage of white-collar jobs than Tatars did. Tatar nationalists in the city made much of this fact in the discourse they articulated during national revival.56 However, data on the relative proportion of each ethnic group in the KamAZ workforce in 1989 obscures a trend that contradicts the nationalists’ picture of blocked opportunity. Namely, significant preference policies were enacted in the city that moved large numbers of rural, uneducated Tatars into training programs and jobs and up the professional ladder at KamAZ. Tatar nationalists in the city again downplayed the social mobility of Tatars and emphasized instead blocked opportunity and ethnic economic underrepresentation at KamAZ. In so doing, they attracted popular support to the nationalist program. Chapter 6 demonstrates that group grievances do not inevitably develop among people with ethnic minority identities. Even when structural economic conditions indicate that minorities are subordinate in some way to other groups in society, and even when ethnic politicians emerge to represent their interests, they do not necessarily respond. This was the case in the low-mobilization republic of Mari El, where Maris were underrepresented in high-status jobs. Although nationalist movements emerged during glasnost, Maris did not support them. I also show that people with minority identities do not necessarily respond to nationalist politicians when they enjoy a relatively strong socioeconomic position, as in the Republic of Komi. Ethnic groups, in other words, are not automatically motivated by the prospect of future wealth to mobilize behind a program of national sovereignty. Through a comparative case study analysis of all Russia’s republics and a comparative discourse analysis of nationalist rhetoric in newspaper articles published there, I show that people supported nationalism only in those republics where nationalist leaders framed issues of ethnic economic inequality, as in Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Tuva. In republics where nationalists focused on other issues, as they did in Komi and Mari El, they failed to attract mass support. Chapter 7 makes the argument that the level of mass support for opposition nationalist movements within Russia’s republics is the critical variable determining the strength of republican secessionism vis-à-vis Moscow during the late

56. David Laitin defines national revival as “a political movement whose purpose is to wrest control of a territory from a regime that leaders of the movement consider to be ‘foreign’ to that territory.” See “Language and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Republics,” Post-Soviet Affairs 12 (January– March 1996): 5.

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1980s and early 1990s. I introduce a coding of republican secessionism based on actions initiated by the republics as well as their responses to policies initiated by Moscow. Next I analyze how, as the Soviet Union democratized, a shift in political accountability facing republican leaders allowed mass nationalist mobilization to exert a significant influence on republican separatist campaigns toward Moscow. Evidence for this argument consists of data showing correlations between secessionism on the one hand and ethnic demonstrations and ethnic violent events in the republics on the other. Finally, case studies of three republics demonstrate that mass nationalism in Tuva and Yakutia influenced republican demands on Moscow at key moments in their sovereignty campaigns, while little mass nationalism in Mari El resulted in low secessionism there. In the concluding chapter, I summarize my findings and reiterate how they challenge common understandings of ethnicity’s power to motivate political behavior. The findings suggest a reconceptualization of nationalism as a highly contingent and fragile political event. Thinking about nationalism as transient— while ethnic identities remain deeply felt—can help to reduce expectations that minority populations are on the verge of mobilizing behind nationalist programs. These insights may be applied to multiethnic societies outside the Soviet space, such as China and Iraq where minority populations and people with ethnic and sectarian identities are often viewed as discrete political blocs. Focusing on how economic structures, people’s experiences of those structures, and the discourse of political entrepreneurs interact to shape people’s political preferences may help to inform policies that avoid reifying ethnic groups as political actors.

2 VARIATION IN MASS NATIONALISM ACROSS RUSSIA’S REPUBLICS

The dramatic intervention by Mikhail Gorbachev into an ideologically, politically, and economically stagnant Soviet Union in the late 1980s triggered unanticipated political developments that weakened the system it was meant to rescue. The policies of glasnost and perestroika permitted people and organizations to articulate ideas challenging prevailing ideologies and the status quo itself. Risktaking newspaper editors began to publish articles about ethnic relations and editorials written by intellectuals with minority ethnic identities. With press reports of popular protests taking place among Crimean Tatars, Armenians in Karabakh, and Latvians and Estonians, awareness of ethnic issues began to develop in Russia’s republics.1 Ethnic intellectuals there founded informal organizations devoted to ethnocultural issues. Groups such as the Club of Udmurt Culture in Udmurtia (Vseudmurtskaia Assotsiatsiia “Udmurt Kenesh,” or VAUK) and the Society of Vep Culture in Karelia (Obshchestvo Vepsskoi Kul'tury, or OVK) sponsored national concerts, advocated naming streets after national poets, and held conferences on subjects like Lenin’s nationalities policies.2 Cultural 1. Mark Beissinger describes the beginnings of nationalist mobilization in the Soviet Union in Nationalist Mobilization. 2. G. A. Komarova, Khronika mezhnatsional'nykh konfliktov v Rossii: 1991 god. [Chronicle of interethnic conflicts in Russia: 1991.] (Moscow: Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology, 1994); Komarova, Khronika zhizni natsional'nostei v SSSR: 1990 god. [Chronicle of the life of nationalities in the USSR: 1990.] (Moscow: Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology, 1996). Komarova, Khronika zhizni natsional'nostei nakanune raspada SSSR: 1989 god. [Chronicle of the life of nationalities on the eve of the collapse of the USSR: 1989.] (Moscow: Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology, 1997). 29

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organizations sometimes focused on restoring spiritual traditions shattered by the Soviet state’s campaigns against religion, as when the All-Buryat Association for the Development of Culture (Vseburiatskaia Assotsiatsiia Razvitiia Kul'tury, or VARK) helped organize a visit to the republic by the Dalai Lama.3 Most of this activity fell within the bounds of officially sanctioned behavior or was tolerated by local leaders in the spirit of glasnost. Soon, however, ethnic activists began to raise overtly political issues and to establish formal nationalist organizations. In some republics, these organizations grew out of the cultural societies; in others, they were formed from scratch. In still other republics, nationalist organizations spun off from Popular Front movements that included prodemocracy and environmental groups. At first, all opposition groups cooperated with one another since prodemocracy and environmental activists shared the nationalists’ commitment to ethnic minority rights and greater local autonomy. Over time, however, environmental activism declined, and the interests of the nationalist and democratic opposition diverged. Nationalist organizations emerged as the locus of opposition to communist rule in the republics. Republican officials, for the most part, opposed the nationalists, prompting some scholars to label the nationalists “counterelites.”4 The founders of nationalist movements generally belonged to the creative intelligentsia and included academics and writers in particular.5 In Chuvashia, for example, the Chuvash Party of National Rebirth (Chuvash Atalana Partii, or ChAP) was led by a locally prominent lawyer, Nikolai Lukiianov, and the philologist and writer Atner Khuzangai, the son of a famous Chuvash poet.6 Ethnic elites who had devoted their careers to studying the titular nationality—writers, artists, ethnographers, historians, linguists, sociologists, and others—were personally and professionally committed to making sense of their own ethnic identity and the place of their ethnic community in Soviet society. At the same time, these individuals were among the most educated and professionalized of Soviet citizens; they were highly conscious of their own elevated status within society. Many of them, in addition to joining opposition groups, used their positions in official state institutions to advance demands for greater ethnic rights. For example, as early as 1989, the Writers’ Union in Tatarstan, an official state

3. Timur Muzaev, Etnicheskii separatizm v Rossii [Ethnic Separatism in Russia] (Moscow: Panorama, 1999); Caroline Humphries, “Buryatia and the Buryats,” in The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States, ed. Graham Smith (New York: Longman, 1996), 113–25. 4. See, for example, Suny, Revenge of the Past, and Roeder, “Soviet Federalism” and Where NationStates Come From. 5. There were some exceptions: nationalist leaders in Buryatia included doctors and government bureaucrats. 6. Muzaev, Etnicheskii separatizm, 203; Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization, 61.

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organization, appealed to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies to grant the republic union republic status—the highest rank in the Soviet Union’s ethnoterritorial administrative hierarchy—so that it could elect a larger number of deputies and obtain increased support for Tatar radio and television stations.7 Nationalist entrepreneurs raised new and varied issues. They criticized official Soviet histories of the republics and sought to write new ones. They lamented Russification and encouraged the study of national languages. They advocated reviving religious traditions associated with the ancestors of the titular group. Nationalists in some republics demanded a redrawing of republican borders to include territory inhabited by coethnics.8 In others, they recognized threats to their nation’s existence from declining birth rates or outmigration. They occasionally demanded greater ethnic representation in political institutions, advocated establishing republican presidencies, and called for privileges for titulars in local economies. Overall, nationalist groups sought greater recognition, rights, and resources—in short, autonomy—from Moscow. Thus before the Soviet collapse, they favored raising the administrative status of their republics from “autonomous” to “union.” After 1991, as the realm of what was politically possible suddenly widened, some nationalist groups began to advocate secession, while others continued to seek autonomy within Russia. In most republics, the nationalist movement was split between two formal organizations—a main, moderate group and a radical group that had either formed concurrently with the first group or splintered off from it as a result of ideological or personnel differences. Usually it was the radical group that advocated secession, often with the support of a nationalist youth organization. Some youth groups claimed to have formed national militias.9 However, in certain places, it was the main group that backed secession; for example, the Karelian Movement (Karel'skoe Dvizhenie) advocated that Karelia join Finland.10 To build popular support, nationalist groups engaged in varied activities and transmitted their message to the public using a range of tactics. At first, activists met in small groups to exchange ideas and then held founding congresses where formal charters (ustavy) were adopted. These organizations established local branches throughout the cities and raions (administrative districts) of the

7. “The Congress of USSR Peoples’ Deputies-Verbatim Report, Izvestia, June 8, 1989, 4–7 in Current Digest of the Soviet Press (CDSP) 51, no. 29 (1989): 20. 8. For example, the Buryat nationalist movement advocated redrawing Buryatia’s pre-1937 borders to incorporate ethnic Buryats living in compact settlements in Ust'-Ordynskii and Aginskii autonomous okrugs and in Irkutsk and Chita oblasts. Muzaev, Etnicheskii separatizm, 73. 9. N. Morozov, “Tatarstan—A People’s Militia Is Being Created,” Pravda, October 16, 1991, 1, in CDSP 53, no. 42 (1991): 28. 10. Muzaev, Etnicheskii separatizm, 149.

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republic, and in neighboring oblasts and republics. In some places, nationalist organizations served as umbrella associations for other groups associated with the titular population, such as religious and cultural associations and youth and women’s groups. They made extensive use of the media, giving interviews and publishing editorials in state-run newspapers whose liberal editors were willing to provide a forum for alternative viewpoints. They spoke on radio and, less often, on television programs. They also published their ideas in academic monographs and books, as well as in newspapers and journals established by the organizations themselves. In March 1990, nationalist groups sponsored candidates in the Soviet Union’s first semi-free elections to both the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow and republican supreme soviets, or local legislatures.11 Elections to the supreme soviets were a defining moment in the politics of certain republics even though party members retained a majority of seats. For the first time, independent candidates—including nationalists—were elected to legislatures that up to that point had been filled by Communist Party appointees.12 Within the supreme soviets, nationalist deputies formed voting blocs, sometimes in cooperation with the prodemocracy faction.13 The presence of nationalists in republican parliaments expanded the movements’ influence as some independents and communist nomenklatura came to support the nationalist position. One of the most important activities for most, though not all, nationalist organizations was public activism. They employed grassroots tactics including mass demonstrations, factory strikes, rallies, pickets, and hunger strikes. Nationalist activists, however, had to tread carefully at first in order to avoid provoking Communist Party leaders in the republics. Officials in Tatarstan, for example, would not permit the nationalist Tatar Public Center access to a printing press, forcing the group to publish its material in Lithuania.14 In Yakutia, after the radical nationalist Sakha Perspective (Sakha Keskile) supported Boris Yeltsin during the 1991 attempted coup d’etat against Gorbachev by hard-line communists, the republic’s

11. Technically, the 1989 elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies were the first semicompetitive elections in the USSR. However, Gorbachev manipulated voting rules, which produced a congress dominated by conservatives. Darrell Slider, “The Soviet Union,” Electoral Studies 9, no. 4 (1990): 295–301. For a discussion of electoral support for nationalists in four republics, see Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization, 132–48. 12. Olga V. Kryshtanovskaia, “Transformation of the Old Nomenklatura into a New Russian Elite,” Russian Social Science Review 37, no. 4 (July–August 1996): 18–40. 13. In Udmurtia, for example, deputies associated with the nationalist Udmurt Kenesh entered into formal cooperation with deputies from Democratic Russia, until the two blocs split over the issue of which candidate to nominate for president of the republic. Muzaev, Etnicheskii separatizm, 192–94. 14. Interview with Damir Iskhakov, TOTs member, November 1996.

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Communist Party fired group members from their jobs in provincial republican cities to slow the group’s growing influence.15 Despite episodes of harassment from state officials, however, over time the nationalists became free to engage in public activism without the expectation of serious state repression. Another initiative undertaken by nationalist organizations was the establishment of national congresses in an attempt to establish formal legislative institutions that would pressure or even supplant republican supreme soviets. The congresses billed themselves as “the highest representative assembly of the nation,” invited coethnics from outside the republic to serve as delegates, and elected formal leaderships. They adopted resolutions on subjects such as republican sovereignty, language, and culture and took a stand on political developments at the federal level, such as whether to support Yeltsin’s federation treaty delimiting the rights and status of Russia’s regions.16 In certain republics, popular support for nationalism began to grow. Small meetings sponsored by nationalist organizations grew into large rallies and demonstrations as support spread from the urban intelligentsia to students, workers, shop clerks, Communist Party members, and government administrators. In some places, people living in rural areas also backed the movement, though this occurred less frequently since nationalist organizations were headquartered in the cities and conducted most of their activities in urban areas. In places where popular nationalism was growing, demonstrations took place often, becoming the subject of ongoing public discussion. Each day brought new headlines about the activities of nationalist groups. However, in other republics where support for nationalism was weak, life continued as usual. In these places, the support base of the nationalist movement never spread beyond a small layer of the urban intelligentsia. Russia’s nationalist movements fit Sidney Tarrow’s definition of social movements as “collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.”17 The nationalist movements, however, sought a more fundamental transformation of the status quo than most social movements because they were oriented toward taking over the state. According to Breuilly, nationalist movements seek state power “and justify this objective on nationalist grounds.”18 Before 1991, the movements in the republics challenged the sovereignty of the Soviet central state in Moscow; 15. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “A State within a State: The Sakha Republic (Yakutia),” in Rediscovering Russia in Asia, ed. Stephen Kotkin and David Wolff (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995). 16. By the mid-1990s, however, these congresses were co-opted by republican governments. 17. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 3–4. 18. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 9.

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after 1991 they challenged the sovereignty of the Russian federal government. In the nationalists’ view, the center denied their ethnic group adequate recognition, in particular the right to political control of the territory they considered their historical homeland. However, because of the radical and rapid political transformations taking place at this time, the nationalists’ relationship to the state, at both the federal (Moscow) and regional (republican) level, was more complicated than one of simple opposition. Many accounts of separatism in Russia focus on the relationship between the republics and Moscow and gloss over politics within the republics. They fail to distinguish between opposition nationalist movements and official republican administrations and instead view the republics as unitary actors in their relations with Moscow. This approach assumes that the nationalist movements were mere instruments of powerful and autonomous republican leaders. In this book I distinguish nationalist movements from republican administrations and investigate the motivations and behavior of each in order to produce an empirically accurate understanding of variations in nationalist mobilization and republican separatism in Russia. Without investigating subfederal politics, it is impossible to answer the question of why people in some republics supported nationalism more than people in other republics and why some republics mounted aggressive separatist campaigns toward Moscow while others remained quiescent. Below, I code Russia’s republics in terms of the highest and lowest levels of mass support for nationalism.

Levels of Mass Nationalism Popular support for nationalism varied dramatically across Russia’s republics. Though opposition nationalist movements led by vocal, committed leaders existed in every republic, the degree to which mass publics mobilized behind these movements differed. The republics with the greatest mass support for nationalism were Tatarstan, Tuva, and Chechnya, followed by Yakutia and Bashkortostan, which displayed moderately high mass nationalism. At the other end of the spectrum, popular nationalism was the lowest in Dagestan, Chuvashia, Udmurtia, Mari El, and Mordovia. Russia’s other republics also displayed relatively low levels of mass nationalism, with negligible differences in the levels of support. For clarity, I separate the republics into two categories: those with high mass nationalism and those with low mass nationalism (table 2.1). My coding is based on several different kinds of indicators of popular support for nationalism, including (1) the number of ethnic demonstrations that occurred in each republic; (2) the incidence of ethnic violence in each republic; (3) public opinion data

CHAPTER 2

Table 2.1

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Mass nationalism in Russia’s republics, 1989–94

HIGH NATIONALISM

LOW NATIONALISM

Tatarstan Tuva Chechnya Yakutia Bashkortostan

Komi Kabardino-Balkaria Dagestan Chuvashia Udmurtia Mordovia Mari El Kalmykia Karelia Buryatia North Ossetia

from the 1993 Colton/Hough survey on support for two key aspects of the nationalists’ program—republican declarations of sovereignty and the right of the republics to secede from Russia—as well as survey data on whether people identified with their republic or with Russia; and (4) a systematic cross-case comparison of ethnic and nationalist politics in Russia’s sixteen republics. I describe each indicator below.

Mass Demonstrations and Ethnic Violence The number of ethnic demonstrations that occurred in each republic is a reliable indicator of popular support for nationalist movements. Participation in demonstrations indicates support for nationalism because it suggests people’s willingness to engage in risky behavior to express dissatisfaction with state authority and the status quo. An individual’s decision to step onto the streets represents a public assertion of community and national identity.19 The number of participants at demonstrations varied across republics and over time. In some republics thousands of people took to the streets at key moments during the period of national revival. Based on data from Mark Beissinger’s extensive data set of mobilization events in the USSR, figure 2.1 presents the number of ethnic demonstrations with one hundred or more participants held in each of Russia’s republics from 1987 to 1992.20 Tatarstan and Checheno-Ingushetia had the 19. Beissinger discusses the meaning of nationalist event in Nationalist Mobilization, 18–28. 20. I am grateful to Mark Beissinger for providing these data. Beissinger defines a demonstration as a “voluntary gathering of persons with the purpose of engaging in a collective display of sentiment for or against public policies.” All demonstrations in the data set had a minimum of one hundred participants. Beissinger defines a mass violent event as “a mass political action whose primary purpose was to inflict violence, either in the form of an attack on people or on property.” Violent events had a minimum of fifteen participants. See Codebook for Disaggregated Event Data: “Mass Demonstrations and Mass Violent Events in the Former USSR, 1987–1992,” available at:

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90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Demonstrations

Kalmykia

Mari El

Mordovia

Chuvashia

Buryatia

Karelia

Udmurtia

Yakutia

Komi

Tuva

Kabardino-Balkaria

Bashkortostan

North Ossetia

Dagestan

Checheno-Ingushetia

Tatarstan

Violent events

Republic

FIGURE 2.1 Ethnic demonstrations and violent events in Russia’s autonomous republics. Source: Mark Beissinger, Codebook for Disaggregated Event Data: “Mass Demonstrations and Mass Violent Events in the Former USSR, 1987–1992,” http://www.princeton. edu/~mbeissin/research.htm.

highest number of demonstrations of all of Russia’s republics, seventy-seven and fifty-eight, respectively.21 The nonnationalist republics of Mordovia and Mari El had no demonstrations. However, in other nationalist republics, few demonstrations were held: Bashkortostan(ten), Tuva (four), and Yakutia (three).22 The number of demonstrations in the republics may be slightly underrepresented here for several reasons.23 First, because Beissinger’s data set concludes in the year 1992, whereas republican campaigns for sovereignty continued until 1994, demonstrations that took place in 1993 and 1994 are not included in the

http://www.princeton.edu/~mbeissin/research.htm. 4, 6. For more on the procedures utilized in collecting the data, see Mark R. Beissinger, “Event Analysis in Transitional Societies: Protest Mobilization in the Former Soviet Union,” in Acts of Dissent: New Developments in the Study of Protest, ed. Dieter Rucht, Ruud Koopmans, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, 284–316 (Berlin: Sigma Press, 1998); and Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization. 21. Note that this data includes demonstrations and violent events only from the Soviet era, before Ingushetia split off from Chechnya. 22. According to Gorenburg, Bashkortostan had fewer demonstrations than other nationalist republics because nationalist groups there chose to focus on a strategy of sponsoring candidates in local elections instead. The demonstrations that did occur were usually in response to a specific crisis. See Minority Ethnic Mobilization, 126–28. 23. Note that the data set does not include hunger strikes or general strikes. I chose to rank the republics according to the number of ethnic demonstrations rather than the number of total demonstrations, since this period generated much popular protest by many groups concerning a diverse array of issues. However, the number of ethnic demonstrations is correlated with the total number of demonstrations.

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data. Second, the coding of demonstrations as ethnic may not capture demonstrations sponsored by nationalist groups in conjunction with other organizations, such as environmentalist and democratic groups. Finally, Beissinger collected data from newspapers published in the center rather than in the republics. Central newspapers were likely to underreport instances of local demonstrations and violence that occurred in the republics.24 The three North Caucasian republics of Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and North Ossetia, it should be noted, hosted a large number of ethnic demonstrations. However, most of these concerned ethnic issues other than republican sovereignty. Major issues included the repatriation of ethnic groups deported by Stalin and the armed conflict between Georgia and the republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.25 For example, in Kabardino-Balkaria, from which Stalin had deported ethnic Balkars to Kazakhstan in 1944, the Balkar nationalist movement wanted to restore the borders of the raions populated by ethnic Balkars to their pre-1944 borders, provoking opposition from the Kabard nationalist movement.26 Ethnic demonstrations in these republics revolved around intraethnic conflicts and displays of sympathy with neighboring Abkhazia and South Ossetia and were not part of nationalist movement campaigns for sovereignty. This is not to say that these republics did not have nationalist movements that held demonstrations; they did. However, most of them did not concern nationalist challenges to state control. Several republics also experienced ethnic violence during this period, though in general it occurred very infrequently. It was related to nationalist mobilization in some, though not all, republics. Those with the largest number of ethnic violent events were Checheno-Ingushetia (twenty-one), Tatarstan (six), Tuva (seven), and Yakutia (two). Also, North Ossetia experienced comparatively high ethnic violence because of the conflict that took place there between Ingush and Ossetians in fall 1992. This violence, however, was not related to a campaign for sovereignty.27 Ethnic violence in Dagestan took place when the repatriated Akkintsy 24. See Mark Beissinger, Codebook for Disaggregated Event Data: “Mass Demonstrations and Mass Violent Events in the Former USSR, 1987–1992,” http://www.princeton.edu/~mbeissin/research.htm. 25. Concerning repatriation issues, Akkintsy clashed with neighboring ethnic groups in Dagestan, Balkars challenged Kabards in Kabardino-Balkaria, and Ingush made claims in the Prigorodnii region of North Ossetia. In terms of the regional armed conflicts, North Ossetia supported South Ossetia against Georgia by taking Ossetian refugees and sending aid and volunteer fighters, while Kabardino-Balkaria took the side of Abkhazia against Georgia. See Jane Omrod, “The North Caucasus: Confederation in Conflict,” in New States, New Politics, ed. Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 26. Muzaev, Etnicheskii separatizm, 118–29. 27. Tomila Lankina discusses ethnic conflict and mobilization in North Ossetia in Governing the Locals: Local Self-Government and Ethnic Mobilization in Russia (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

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CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE

fought over land ownership with various groups in that republic. In contrast, the other republics witnessed little to no ethnic violence during this period. Overall, data on ethnic demonstrations and violent events reveal significant differences in the frequency of demonstrations and violence across Russia’s republics. The data also suggest that Tatarstan and Checheno-Ingushetia, as the sites of the most demonstrations and violent events during the period 1987 to 1992, could be characterized as the most nationalist republics.

Mass Attitudes Data from a 1993 survey of people in Russia’s republics led by political scientists Timothy Colton and Jerry Hough provide information on the degree of popular support for two aspects of the nationalists’ agenda: republican declarations of sovereignty and the right of the republics to secede from Russia.28 In response to the question, “How do you feel about the declarations of sovereignty by the former ARs of the Russian Federation?” the largest percentages of people identifying with the following ethnic groups supported or partially supported the declarations: Yakuts, Ingush, Chechens, Tuvans, Bashkirs, Kalmyks, and Tatars. Between 56 percent and 94 percent of these nationalities supported republican sovereignty. Significantly lower levels of support for the sovereignty declarations were expressed by Mordvinians, Mari, Chuvash, and Dagestanis (figure 2.2). Another question on the Colton/Hough survey concerned whether republics should have a right to secede from the Russian Federation. Results from the question “Should all republics have the right of self-determination, including the right of withdrawal from the federation?” indicate that most support was found among Ingush, Chechens, Tuvans, and Yakuts (figure 2.3). Bashkirs and Tatars, however, were in the middle of the group. Very few Mordvinians, Mari and Chuvash (fewer than 10 percent) supported secession. Support for secession represented the radical end of the spectrum among nationalist programs in the republics at this time. Only a few nationalist organizations—for example, radicals in Chechnya, Tuva, and Tatarstan—articulated a right to secession as a central part of their programs. It should also be noted that popular support for nationalism in many republics was already beginning to decline across Russia by 1993. Thus the percentage of titulars supporting republican sovereignty declarations and secession was probably slightly higher in the two years before this survey was conducted.

28. Colton/Hough NSF Pre-election Survey, 1993. The survey did not include a question about support for nationalist organizations.

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80 60 40 20

Mordvinians

Mari

Dagestanis

Chuvash

Karelians

Komi

N. Ossetians

Udmurtis

Balkars

Buryats

Kabardins

Tatars

Kalmyks

Bashkirs

Tuvans

Yakuts

Chechens

0 Ingush

Percentage who completely or partially support

100

Titular ethnic group

Percentage of titular support

FIGURE 2.2 Titular support for AR declarations of sovereignty (“How do you feel about the declarations of sovereignty by the former autonomous republics of the Russian Federation?”). Source: Colton/Hough NSF Pre-election Survey, 1993.

100 80 60 40 20

Mordvinians

Mari

Chuvash

Udmurtis

Komi

Karelians

Dagestanis

Tatars

N. Ossetians

Buryats

Bashkirs

Balkars

Kabardins

Kalmyks

Yakuts

Tuvans

Chechens

Ingush

0

Titular ethnic group FIGURE 2.3 Titular support for secession (“Should all republics have the right of selfdetermination, including the right of withdrawal from the Russian Federation?”). Source: Colton/Hough NSF Pre-election Survey, 1993.

Another indicator of support for nationalist separatism could be the degree to which people identify with a substate region more than with the country as a whole. The Colton / Hough survey included a question asking respondents whether they considered themselves residents of their republic or residents of Russia. When asked, “Of what polity do you consider yourself a representative?”

Mari

Karelians

Ingush

Balkars

Chuvash

Mordvinians

Udmurtis

N. Ossetians

Kabardins

Komi

Bashkirs

Kalmyks

Buryats

Tatars

Yakuts

Tuvans

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Dagestanis (Avars)

CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE

Chechens

Percentage answering “only my republic”

40

Titular ethnic group

FIGURE 2.4 Titulars defining themselves as representative of republic rather than Russia (“Of what polity do you consider yourself a representative?”). Source: Colton/ Hough NSF Pre-election Survey, 1993.

respondents could answer “only my republic”; “more my republic than Russia”; “equally my republic and Russia”; “more Russia than my republic”; or “only Russia.” The survey offered respondents a choice of membership in one of two civic polities, their republic or the Russian Federation, by employing the term Rossiia to denote the Russian Federation. Rossiia denotes the Russian state, a polity defined in terms of civic rather than ethnic membership. I include the results here on the percentage of titulars who chose the first answer, “only my republic,” since this is the most extreme expression of loyalty to a substate region and is likely to be related to support for nationalism (figure 2.4). Chechens comprised the largest percentage by far of all titulars claiming to be representative of only their republic, followed by Tuvans, Yakuts, Avars (a Dagestani nationality), Tatars, Buryats, Kalmyks, and Bashkirs. Survey results for the second answer—“more my republic than Russia”—revealed a similar ranking, with many titulars considering themselves equally representative of their republic and of Russia.29 Overall, these results show that titulars in Chechnya, Tuva, and Yakutia supported certain elements of the nationalist program more than titulars in other republics. Tatars and Bashkirs also demonstrated support for these issues, though not to the same degree.

29. Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997), 262.

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Case Studies In order to understand nationalist politics within Russia’s republics, I completed case studies of each of the sixteen autonomous republics during the transitional period 1988–93. The studies compared information on the types and activities of nationalist organizations in each republic, whether their representatives received electoral support in the 1990 semicompetitive elections to republican supreme soviets,30 the relationship between the nationalist movement and republican authorities, and the presence of mass support for nationalism. I compiled the studies using (1) documents published by nationalist organizations in each republic, (2) Russian-language articles and monographs published in both the republics and Moscow, (3) articles written by Western and Russian experts on each region, and (4) a systematic reading of news reports from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Reports and Current Digest of the Soviet Press during 1988–93. My case study analysis indicates a high degree of popular support for opposition nationalist movements in the republics of Tatarstan, Tuva, Bashkortostan, Yakutia, and Chechnya and weak mass nationalism in most other republics. Leading Russian experts on politics in Russia’s republics also identify these republics as the most nationalist.31 It is critical to note, however, that high popular support for nationalism in these republics does not mean that all people identifying with the titular nationality in these places were suddenly won over to the nationalist cause. On the contrary, support for nationalism varied greatly, and even within the most nationalist republics many people who identified with a particular ethnic group were indifferent or opposed to nationalism. Mass apathy and opposition are not unique to the Russian context. As Breuilly states, “nationalism is usually a minority movement pursued against the indifference and, frequently, the hostility of the majority of the members of the ‘nation’ in

30. Data on the 1990 Supreme Soviet elections in the ARs are sporadic: some local newspapers published the electoral results at the time the elections took place. However, because under Soviet law candidates in the elections were not permitted to affiliate with particular parties or movements, it is not possible to determine the political affiliation of a particular deputy from a list of those elected. Personal knowledge of the affiliations of individual deputies is therefore necessary in order to code him or her as a nationalist. In the absence of this local knowledge, I rely on the observations (albeit incomplete) of the Russian scholar Timur Muzaev in his book Etnicheskii separatizm, 1999. 31. Russian scholars Valery Tishkov, Leokadia Drobizheva, and Mikhail Guboglo headed ongoing, multiyear studies through the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IEA-RAN) in conjunction with American political scientists and funded by the National Science Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation. See, in particular, Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict; and Leokadia M. Drobizheva, A. R. Aklaev, M. C. Kashuba, and V. V. Koroteeva, in Natsional'noe samosoznanie i natsionalizm v Rossiiskoi Federatsii nachala 1990-kh godov [National Consciousness and Nationalism in the Russian Federation in the early 1990s] (Moscow: IEA-RAN, 1994).

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whose name the nationalists act.”32 Nevertheless, the fact remains that significant differences in levels of popular nationalism existed among Russia’s republics. Though all republics faced similarly fluid and ambiguous conditions as a result of central state implosion, only some used the opportunity to support nationalist transformation.

Explanations for Republican Secessionism The post–Soviet politics literature has put forward several kinds of arguments to explain nationalist mobilization and campaigns for sovereignty in the Soviet Union and Russia; these can be grouped into four categories: historicalinstitutional, ethnodemographic, cultural, and economic-structural. While some existing explanations have advanced our understanding, most share several shortcomings. They explain the emergence of nationalist separatism by focusing mainly on regional elites or on the presence of structural economic and political variables. They treat ethnic groups as bounded political actors, an approach that essentializes ethnic masses and overpredicts the politicization of ethnicity. As a result, most explanations cannot account for empirical variation in either the degree of mass mobilization within the republics or the intensity of sovereignty demands that republics made on Moscow.

Historical-Institutional Arguments A series of early, important analyses by Ronald Suny, Philip Roeder, and Rogers Brubaker argue that nationalist separatism among the USSR’s union republics developed as a result of the Soviet state’s nationality policies and federal structure.33 These studies have stimulated theorizing in ways that go beyond the authors’ original insights and are equally relevant to Russia’s republics. They emphasize how Soviet state policies served to nurture and institutionalize ethnicity within the republics, creating both national elites and masses who were prepared to support nationalism when the opportunity arose during glasnost. To begin with, Lenin’s initial decision to endow minority populations with territorial rather than cultural autonomy granted certain populations nominal “homelands” in the form of republics or autonomous regions and provided them with rights within those homelands. Titular groups developed an official, staterecognized language and culture, but Russians and other cultural groups could 32. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 405. 33. Roeder, “Soviet Federalism”; Suny, Revenge of the Past; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed.

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not. Second, the Soviet state instituted a system of passport identity in which citizens “inherited” nationality (ethnic affiliation) at birth, thereby instilling the idea that identity was something primordial and unalterable rather than based on place of residence or self-identification.34 Soviet citizens had to report the identity listed in their passport in all official encounters with the state—e.g., when applying for training programs in factories, higher education, and jobs, as well as to the various institutions the Soviet regime established for educated titulars, such as ethnic research institutes, writers’ and artists’ unions, and publishing houses. The Soviet state also implemented a set of policies known as korenizatsiia (indigenization), which granted preferences to titular nationalities in higher education, enterprise management, job training, the Communist Party, and government administration. These privileges, which titulars could enjoy only within the boundaries of their republics, were designed to advance the position of titular populations vis-à-vis other nationalities living there. By the late Soviet era, titulars had made significant gains in education and professional achievement. They worked in the Communist Party, universities, trade unions, the Council of Ministers, writers’ unions, local government administration, security organs, and the Academy of Sciences. Titular peasants became “proletarianized,” taking jobs in newly industrialized republican cities.35 State-defined incentives and quotas succeeded in moving titulars from farm to factory, from primary school to university, and into the highest reaches of management and government administration. Thus, korenizatsiia created an educated middle class and a local political leadership out of the titular population, and it simultaneously assimilated them into a Russified, Soviet social order.36 The Soviet policies of indigenization and passport identity within the context of industrializing, pseudostate republican territories ended up providing, according to Ronald Suny, “a social and cultural base” for republican counterelites to establish broad-based nationalist movements. As he states, “[A] state that had set out to overcome nationalism. . . . had in fact created a set of institutions and initiated processes that fostered the development of conscious, secular, politically mobilizable nationalities.”37 Philip Roeder points to the consequences of ethnofederalist institutions to explain differences in the level of nationalist sepa-

34. Only children of mixed parentage were allowed to choose their nationality at age sixteen. See Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1982). 35. Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 433. 36. Victor Zaslavsky, “Nationalism and Democratic Transition in Postcommunist Societies,” Daedalus 121, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 102. 37. Suny, Revenge of the Past, 126.

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ratism that existed among the union republics. Titular nationalities in Georgia, Armenia, and the Baltics, he argues, were so successful at building an indigenous cadre and intelligentsia inside their republics that Moscow redirected resources away from them and toward the underdeveloped Central Asian republics. Then, when the Soviet economy contracted at the end of the 1980s, titular elites in the advanced republics found their own social mobility and opportunities frustrated, a situation that inspired them to seek national autonomy from Moscow.38 These accounts provide clear arguments about the origins of elite identity and interests and why they promoted nationalist programs. They have less to say, however, about the general phenomenon of nationalism—that is, why masses follow elites. The fact that Soviet history and institutions helped create ethnonational identity at the mass level does not mean that those identities led logically to mass mobilization in support of nationalism. If identity led deterministically to nationalism, we would observe nationalism in all Soviet and Russian republics rather than in just some of them. Dmitry Gorenburg provides an explanation for the variation in mass nationalism in Russia’s republics by emphasizing different kinds of Soviet state institutions.39 Instead of assuming that ethnic masses automatically follow nationalist leaders, Gorenburg argues that the institutions of native language education, academic institutes studying local culture, ethnic preferences in government employment, and cultural institutions explain the degree to which ethnic masses mobilized behind nationalist movements. These institutions strengthened ethnic identities and established dense social networks among titulars in high-mobilization republics such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, thereby facilitating mass mobilization. In republics where institutional penetration did not reach as deeply (e.g., Chuvashia), popular support for nationalism was correspondingly lower. Historical-institutional explanations offer a thought-provoking analysis of the effects of central state policy and institutions on elites in the republics. However, aside from Gorenburg’s account, they fail to address the question of why masses responded to elites. These accounts maintain that state institutions exert a powerful or even deterministic effect on people’s identity. But the link between identity and interest is underspecified. The fact that people had ethnic identities does not mean that they necessarily desired national sovereignty or the particular policies promoted by nationalist elites. Why were national policies and institutions so powerful that they were able to crowd out the influence of other Soviet institutions and experiences so that ethnicity became people’s primary and politically relevant identity? Though historical-institutional explanations provide 38. Roeder, “Soviet Federalism,” 216–19. 39. Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization, 24.

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compelling explanations for the nationalist behavior of titular elites, they leave an open space for further theorizing on the link between individual identification and mass support for nationalism.

Demographic Arguments Theories that emphasize the importance of demography maintain that nationalist separatism is more likely to develop when an ethnic group forms a numerical majority of a region’s total population. In the words of Donald Horowitz, “The strength of a secessionist movement and the heterogeneity of its region are inversely related.”40 The fact that Russians rather than titular nationalities were a majority of the population in most of Russia’s republics is frequently invoked to explain why the republics did not imitate the secessionist behavior of the Soviet Union’s union republics. Gail Lapidus and Edward Walker, for example, write that sizable Russian populations in the republics “make Russia less vulnerable to fragmentation along ethnic lines than the former USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.”41 James Hughes, noting that titulars constitute a simple plurality in only three of Russia’s republics42 and an absolute majority in only four,43 concludes that separatism was impeded by the “spatial dispersion of Russians . . . throughout the . . . territory of the Federation.”44 These analysts do not necessarily believe that demography alone accounts for the emergence of nationalist separatism, but they see relative ethnic percentages as an important background condition or as one of several key factors. This argument seems so commonsensical that analysts often provide no explanation as to why demography should matter. It is reasonable to expect that a critical mass of people identifying with a particular ethnic group is necessary for nationalist mobilization. Without it, there simply may not be enough people to administer an ethnonational state, such as in Karelia, where Karelians form only 10 percent of the population. Moreover, separatist regions with large ethnic populations are generally taken more seriously as potential states by the international community than are regions with tiny ethnic populations—and, as Mark Beissinger

40. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 267. 41. Lapidus and Walker, “Nationalism, Regionalism, and Federalism,” 87. Also see Lapidus, “Asymmetrical Federalism,” and Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 42. Tatarstan, 48 percent; Kalmykia, 45 percent; Kabardino-Balkaria: Kabards, 48 percent and Balkars, 9 percent. 43. Tuva, 64 percent; North Ossetia, 53 percent; Chechnya, 58 percent; and Chuvashia, 68 percent. 44. Hughes, “From Federalism to Recentralization,” 131, 134.

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argues, international support is itself a resource that nationalist organizations can use to accomplish their goals.45 The primary way in which demography is thought to influence nationalist mobilization in a plural society, however, is through the logic of an ethnic census. In this view, a national election resembles an ethnic census insofar as the majority ethnic group will supposedly win more votes than the minority group and dominate all future electoral contests. But elections resemble censuses only if we believe that all people sharing a particular ethnic identity act as a political bloc with fixed interests that always oppose the interests of other ethnic groups. This logic is erroneous at both a theoretical and an empirical level. In using demographic structure as a proxy for political preferences, the logic essentializes the behavior of individuals with ethnic affiliations. Whether political preferences cohere among people with a common ethnic identity and whether the preferences of different ethnic groups coincide are empirical questions. By assuming that ethnic demography determines electoral outcomes, observers essentialize the relationship between ethnic identity and politics and therefore overpredict nationalist separatism in some places and fail to predict it in others. The ethnic census logic as applied to Russia and the Soviet Union would predict that people with Russian identities and people with titular identities always disagree on the question of republican separatism. Yet this was not the case. First, a significant minority of Russians living in the republics supported titular nationalism. For example, 47 percent of Russians in Tatarstan voted in favor of sovereignty in a popular referendum held there in 1992, just as many Russians had voted for Ukrainian independence a year earlier.46 To be sure, many ethnic Russians opposed titular nationalism, and Russian politicians emerged to form pro-Russian organizations and stage counterprotests. But the support they received from ordinary Russians never reached significant levels. Most Russians who participated in politics did so along ideological dimensions, joining, for example, democratic, agrarian, or communist parties. Next, and again contrary to the prediction that demography is a critical variable, popular support for ethnonationalism among titular populations varied widely. Many titulars, in fact, opposed nationalist programs or remained indifferent to them. During the extremely volatile years of political transition, various alternatives to nationalism existed. The group Democratic Russia, for example, offered a democratic ideology and well-organized political movement.

45. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization. 46. Forty-six percent of Russians failed to vote in Tatarstan’s sovereignty referendum, and only 7 percent voted against sovereignty. Also, in Estonia and Latvia many Russians supported nationalist campaigns prior to 1991.

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Conservatives and others clung to the status quo. Other people with titular identities remained ideologically committed to the Communist Party.47 Still others, unsure of what the future held, adopted an agnostic attitude about politics. So while fluid and ambiguous conditions during the period of political transition permitted the formation of new social identities such that many titulars began to understand their identity in a way that entailed supporting nationalism, other titulars embraced identities such as democrat, citizen of the Russian Federation, or businessman. Still others, apprehensive about the many changes each new day brought, clung to their identities as Soviet citizens. Thus we cannot assume that ethnicity will become the primary cleavage in politics during times of massive change. The failure of ethnic demography to explain nationalist separatism in Russia is demonstrated by the fact that nationalism is not correlated with republics in which titulars formed either a majority, a plurality, or a minority (table 2.2). First, in two of the most nationalist republics—Yakutia and Bashkortostan— titulars were a distinct minority as of 1989: 33.4 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Next, popular nationalism failed to develop in two republics where titulars constituted a majority: Chuvashia (68.7 percent) and North Ossetia (53 percent). On the other hand, Chechnya and Tuva, where titulars formed 58 percent and 64 percent of each republic’s population, did experience strong mass nationalist mobilization. Among the republics where titulars were a plurality of the population, Tatarstan (48.5 percent) was strongly nationalist. Yet two other republics with a plurality of titulars, Kabardino-Balkaria and Kalmykia, demonstrated moderate to low and very low nationalism. Overall, the data show an indeterminate relationship between ethnic demography and nationalist mobilization, undercutting the explanatory power of demography as a critical variable. In sum, the logic of the demographic hypothesis predicts nationalist mobilization among titulars in republics where little or none occurred and fails to predict nationalism in several republics where it did develop. Moreover, the logic makes erroneous predictions about the behavior of ethnic Russians in some republics. By assuming that people with ethnic affiliations act as voting blocs, demographic hypotheses both over- and underpredict nationalism in Russia’s republics and obscure our understanding of the reasons why some people choose to engage in nationalist activity.

47. See Geoffrey Hosking, Jonathan Aves, Peter J. S. Duncan, The Road to Post-Communism: Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union, 1985–1991 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

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Table 2.2 Demography and nationalist mobilization in Russia’s republics, 1989 NATIONALIST REPUBLICS

NONNATIONALIST REPUBLICS

Titular majority

Checheno-Ingushetia (71%)* Tuva (64%)

Chuvashia (69%) North Ossetia (53%) Dagestan (90%)*

Titular plurality

Tatarstan (48%)

Kalmykia (45%) Kabardino-Balkaria (57%)*

Titular minority

Yakutia (33%) Bashkortostan (22%)

Karelia (10%) Buryatia (24%) Komi (23%) Udmurtia (31%) Mari El (43%) Mordovia (33%)

Source: Data compiled from the 1989 USSR All-Union census. * Note: Chechens formed 58% and Ingush 13% of Checheno-Ingushetia; Kabards were 48% and Balkars 9% of Kabardino-Balkaria; and Dagestan was made up of multiple nationalities: Avars (28%); Dargins (16%); Kymyk (13%); Lezgin (11%); Lak (5%); Tabasaran (4%); Azeris (4%); Chechens (4%); Nogai (2%); and Jews (1%).

Cultural Arguments In some accounts, culture plays an important role in motivating nationalist mobilization and ethnic conflict. Though very few observers today take a primordialist approach in which cultural difference is considered a sufficient condition for political mobilization,48 the relevance of culture to political behavior is nevertheless often overstated. Some accounts assume first, that all people who have a particular ethnic identity share common cultural attributes and beliefs such as language, religion, livelihood, historical understandings, myths, and memories; and second, that ethnic identities, once they become established as social facts, engender intense emotional attachments.49 These assumptions rely on Anthony Smith’s definition of ethnic community in which the culture of a group endures over time and exists prior to political mobilization.50 In this view, ethnic groups

48. Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993); Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Clifford Geertz, Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963). 49. Walker Connor states that “the national bond is subconscious and emotional rather than conscious and rational” in “Beyond Reason: The Nature of the Ethnonational Bond,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16, no. 3 (July 1993): 373–89. For Horowitz, the strong emotions associated with ethnicity are due to people’s psychological need to belong to a kinlike community. See Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 55–64. Also see Anthony Smith, “The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism” in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, ed. Michael Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 27–42. 50. Smith defines an ethnic community as sharing a common proper name, myths of common ancestry, historical memories, distinctive elements of culture, an association with a given territory, and a sense of social solidarity. The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 32.

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have beliefs and strong feelings about themselves and about other ethnic groups that are rooted in history, myth, and memory.51 Nationalist mobilization and ethnic violence are caused, in part, by these static beliefs and feelings. Although many studies claim to have jettisoned primordialist assumptions, they make similar essentialist assumptions that reify ethnic groups and overpredict the incidence of mobilization and conflict. In popular understanding, for example, nationalist mobilization is caused by intergroup cultural difference, especially when the culture of an ethnic minority differs from that of the group in control of the central state.52 Evidence from the Soviet Union and Russia contradicts this claim. As has been observed, popular nationalism was weak in the Muslim, clan-based, “traditionalist” republics of Central Asia. Likewise, in Russia, Buddhist Buryatia and Kalmykia and Muslim North Ossetia, Dagestan, and Kabardino-Balkaria are all examples of rural, poor republics with distinct local cultural practices and low nationalist mobilization. The populations of two republics that did experience nationalist mobilization— Tatarstan and Bashkortostan—were nominally Muslim. Only in the nationalist republic of Chechnya did a significant portion of the population practice Islam. Thus there is almost no correlation between the cultural distinctiveness of republican populations and nationalist mobilization across Russia’s republics. Among political scientists, a significant part of the international relations literature assumes that ethnic groups maintain static cultural practices and beliefs that determine group interests. For example, several theories identify strategic conditions such as a weak central state and the security dilemma as fundamental causes of nationalism and ethnic conflict.53 Under anarchic conditions, ethnic groups feel threatened by each other, evaluate each other’s intentions based on past historical conflicts, and thus have incentives to attack preemptively. These

Stephen Van Evera relies on Smith’s definition in “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” International Security, 18, no. 4 (Spring 1994): 5–39, as does Michael Brown, “Causes and Implications of Ethnic Conflict,” in Brown, Ethnic Conflict and International Security, 3–26. 51. Many scholars, of course, have moved beyond this static view of culture and theorize culture as a dynamic and changing arena of interaction. For example, see Laitin, Nations, States and Violence. 52. This hypothesis is largely discredited among scholars. For an exception, see Jerry Muller, “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, March/April, 2008, 425–52. 53. See Barry Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival 35, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 27–47; Michael Brown, “The Causes of Internal Conflict: An Overview,” in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict, ed. Michael Brown, Owen R. Cote, Jr., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 3–25; and David Lake and Donald Rothchild, “Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict,” in Brown et. al., Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict, 97–131; and David Lake and Donald Rothchild, “Spreading Fear: The Genesis of Transnational Ethnic Conflict,” in The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation, ed. David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3–32.

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accounts maintain first, that ethnic groups are distinct cultural entities54 and second, that a history of oppression or conflict means that intense emotions and negative evaluations of other ethnic groups are present prior to political mobilization.55 According to these and similar accounts,56 when central states collapse or democratize, ethnic groups encounter each other with latent hostilities, prejudices, or hatreds that were established at some point in the past. While such intergroup hatreds may not be quite as ancient as those invoked by primordialists, they are assumed to be a constitutive part of ethnic groups. Thus the boundaries between people—i.e., who will mobilize and against whom—are fixed and exogenous to the politics of national revival. If ethnic groups are cohesive political blocs with static beliefs and feelings, then the right combination of structural conditions will easily trigger mobilization and violence. These accounts overpredict nationalist mobilization and ethnic violence. Michael Brown, for example, erroneously forecast ethnic conflict in Russia by assuming that the “dozens of ethnic groups” there had “spent centuries despising each other”—a situation that could “spark violent conflict” if irresponsible leaders were to emerge during the country’s economic crisis.57 Other accounts hypothesize that historical events like colonization, oppression, and violence against a minority ethnic group encourage demands for independent nationhood.58 History by itself, however, is rarely determinative. A traumatic historical episode is not understood in identical terms by all people who share an ethnic identity. Political entrepreneurs must frame and define past events in particular ways to persuade people in the present that an injustice has occurred. They must actively choose to interpret historical events as unjustly perpetrated on an innocent collective by a malicious and culpable state or ethnic other. Conversely, politicians may choose to define past events in a manner that integrates people and ties them to a common state. As Valerie Bunce states, a

54. As Posen states, “The ‘groupness’ of the ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic collectivities that emerge from collapsed empires gives each of them an inherent offensive military power.” “The Security Dilemma,” 30. 55. For Brown, if antagonistic historical events have occurred, negative group perceptions and emotions are simply there. Lake and Rothchild agree but maintain that they must become magnified by structural conditions and self-interested entrepreneurs for mobilization to occur. See Brown, “Causes of Internal Conflict,” 3–25; Lake and Rothchild, “Containing Fear,” 97–131. 56. Stephen Van Evera, for example, emphasizes demographic intermingling of ethnic groups as well as other factors as possible sources of nationalist conflict in “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” 26–60. 57. Brown, “Causes of Internal Conflict,” 23. 58. Stuart Kaufman states that Moldova had a history of oppression by Russia in “Spiraling to Ethnic War: Elites, Masses, and Moscow in Moldova’s Civil War,” International Security 21, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 108–38. See also Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” 44–46.

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“painful past can serve as a pretext for cooperation, as in Spain, or conflict, as in Yugoslavia.”59 The point that cultural entrepreneurs play a key role in defining the meaning of past events has been emphasized by many scholars of nationalism, including Jack Snyder, M. Crawford Young, and John Breuilly.60 But it bears repeating with regard to the Soviet context. The historical fact that Stalin deported Chechens in 1944 suggests that this traumatic experience may have inspired nationalism among Chechens. Yet it is critical to keep in mind that some of the very Chechens who personally suffered or lost relatives in the deportation later joined the Communist Party and built successful careers as productive members of Soviet society. They understood the Soviet state as their homeland. The same is true of many Ukrainians and titular nationalities in the Baltics whose ancestors experienced deportation, murder, and famine.61 Despite past traumatic experiences, titular nationalities in the USSR had good reasons to appreciate the Soviet system since they benefited from central state policies of education, urbanization, and employment, as well as from a rising standard of living in a state that became a superpower after World War II. In general, regardless of whether people have experienced historical injustice or historical advantage in the past, political entrepreneurs must define events in the present in particular ways in order to shape the shared social understandings necessary for mobilization. A brief review of repressive historical events in Russia’s other republics demonstrates this point. Like the Chechens, Balkars in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachai in Karachaevo-Cherkessia were also deported but did not exhibit any significant level of nationalist mobilization. Other severely destructive historical events took place in the republics, including the destruction of religion and Stalin’s murder and imprisonment of members of national intelligentsias. In Buryatia, for example, the intelligentsia was purged and Buddhist monasteries destroyed.62 Although various events that harmed people identifying with titular nationalities occurred in all Russia’s republics, mass support for nationalism developed in

59. See Valerie Bunce, “Subversive Institutions: The End of the Soviet State in Comparative Perspective,” Post-Soviet Affairs 14, no. 4 (October 1998): 323–54. See 338–39. 60. Jack Snyder argues that historical legacies create a propensity for ethnic conflict, but he highlights the role of elite mythmaking among other factors in From Voting to Violence. See also Young, Politics of Cultural Pluralism, and “The National and Colonial Question and Marxism” in Thinking Theoretically, pp. 67–97; Breuilly, Nationalism and the State. 61. It is also true of many citizens in East European states who viewed communist rule after World War II as their own national system of government rather than as something imposed by a foreign oppressor. 62. Humphries, “Buryatiya and the Buryats”; Gail Fondahl, “Siberia: Assimilation and Its Discontents,” in New States New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations, ed. Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 190–232.

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only a few of them. Moreover, republics with considerably less dramatic histories of Soviet oppression, such as Tuva and Tatarstan, did develop mass support for nationalism. Empirically, then, there is no correlation between the fact of historical oppression and nationalist mobilization across Russia’s republics. Interestingly, even scholars who view ethnic groups as having fixed cultures and histories recognize the key role that elites play in interpreting these events. For example, Stephen Van Evera argues that the size and severity of the crimes matter in determining whether violent nationalist conflict will occur, but he also states that people’s interpretation of events is critical. Heinous past crimes are more likely to motivate violence, he argues, if the victim attaches responsibility to a group that still exists.63 Barry Posen makes the structuralist argument that ethnic groups assess each other’s military intentions on the basis of historical conflict, but then he undercuts his point in discussing the case of Ukraine. He attributes the absence of ethnic conflict there in part to the decision by Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk to blame the Great Famine of the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians on the Bolsheviks rather than the Russians. Thus Posen implicitly recognizes that ethnic Ukrainians did not enter 1991 with a shared view of the famine as crime perpetrated by Russians.64 Overall, the mere fact of a traumatic historical event does not denote the presence of a group grievance that persists over time and produces ethnic mobilization when conditions permit. Another hypothesis maintains that nationalist mobilization is more likely to occur when the state discriminates against a minority along cultural lines, e.g., by banning its religion, language, or economic livelihood. Some international relations scholars make this argument implicitly in assuming that entire ethnic populations support certain policies, such as minority language or religious revival.65 The fact of discrimination may provoke a grievance among people with a shared ethnicity. But this outcome is not inevitable because people with the same identity do not all have common cultural attributes and intense feelings about those attributes, and, as discussed above, they do not necessarily interpret their experiences and interests in the same way. This point may be illustrated by the example of religion in Russia’s republics. The Soviet state essentially obliterated organized religion in Russia—a fact that could have produced a grievance among ethnic minorities who were associated

63. Elsewhere in the same article, Van Evera explicitly emphasizes the role of politicians, historians, and writers in making myths that glorify the nation, whitewash its wrongdoings, and malign ethnic others. “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” 44–45 and 48–49. 64. Posen, “Security Dilemma,” 3. Also see Jack Snyder’s discussion of the lack of common attitudes among Ukrainians in From Voting to Violence, 257–59. 65. Brown, “Causes and Implications of Ethnic Conflict,” 3–26; Kaufman, “Spiraling to Ethnic War,” 108–38.

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with a minority religion such as Islam or Buddhism. However, such a result was not inevitable. In Tatarstan, for example, Islam was as alien to most ethnic Tatars as Orthodoxy was to ethnic Russians. Throughout the decades of Soviet rule, many Tatar families had hidden the fact that a grandparent was a village mullah and had raised their children as secular in order to avoid punishment from Soviet authorities. Generations raised in this way did not know, value, or even associate Islam with their ethnicity. For example, Asilbilka Zakirovna, a middleaged woman and government administrator, strongly identified as a Tatar. She stated that as a Tatar, she had a Muslim identity but that neither she nor her husband (who was a Russian and therefore a Christian) followed religious traditions or even knew what they were. She explained that she hadn’t been raised that way and that it all seemed very strange to her. “Maybe,” she said, “I’ll have more time when I retire, although I know that I would find the time to go to mosque and pray if I wanted to.”66 Zakirovna’s comments capture a common sensibility among many Tatars. But even Tatars who were practicing Muslims—religious revival during glasnost increased the numbers of converts to Islam—rarely linked their Islamic identity to the Tatar nationalist program or to politics in general.67 Finally, many Tatars in Tatarstan were not Muslim: the Kriashen Tatars were Orthodox Christian, whereas other Tatars became Jehovah’s Witnesses during Soviet rule.68 Rather than preserve certain cultural practices associated with a particular ethnicity, many individuals choose to adapt, change, or assimilate in response to various conditions they face. Rural populations are often assumed to support nationalism because they are supposedly committed to the continuation or reestablishment of cultural practices, customs, and traditional modes of living. But the end of Soviet rule did not witness the mass conversion of rural titular populations to Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity. Rural dwellers also might have been expected to back automatically the promotion of national languages, which the Soviet regime had subordinated to Russian, or to reestablish traditional livelihoods made obsolete by state-led industrialization and collectivization, such as nomadic pastoralism, sheep or reindeer herding, and cattle raising.69 Yet the reality of rural life was more complex. Soviet rule dramatically transformed rural life by suppressing religious practice, imposing collectivization

66. Interview with Asilbilka Zakirovna, Tatarstan GosSobranie (State Duma), Kazan, March 4, 1997. 67. Interview with Tatar informant, June 1, 1997 Naberezhnye Chelny; interview with Tatar student, March 25, 1997, Kazan; interview with Valyulya Yakup, imam, February 12, 1991, Kazan. 68. Field notes, Naberezhnye Chelny, May–June 1997. 69. These forms of discrimination were also experienced by ethnic Russians, including the grandparents of Boris Yeltsin. See Timothy Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

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and industrialization, and promoting education and urbanization. Rural dwellers responded in various ways. Some adapted to the new conditions to avoid persecution; others genuinely committed to communist ideology; still others pragmatically learned Russian and migrated to the cities to work in industry. Traditional practices and beliefs were preserved in some places and fused with new Soviet institutions elsewhere.70 In addition, the Soviet state labeled most rural practices backward and inferior—values that were absorbed not only by ethnic Russians but by minority populations as well. In fact, precisely because certain cultural practices signified a subordinate social status, many people abandoned them to assimilate to the dominant community. Thus people with ethnic identities whose ancestors engaged in cultural practices different from those of the dominant society do not automatically perceive those practices as either “theirs” or in need of political expression. By the time national revival began in the late 1980s after decades of Soviet rule, many people with ethnic identities who had been living out their lives in modern Soviet society saw a return to traditional practices as quite irrelevant to their current concerns and beliefs. In the USSR, where national revival began after the period in which the state had banned minority cultural practices, many people had already discarded those practices and beliefs—if they ever had them in the first place—while preserving their ethnic identities. People with titular identities living in agrarian areas did not constitute a monolithic group in terms of their various social identities, cultural attributes, attitudes and beliefs, or behavior. Despite the particular ways in which rural and ethnic identities overlapped, it is incorrect to view the countryside as home to ethnic groups prepared to mobilize in support of nationalism when given the opportunity.

Economic-Structural Arguments Another influential approach—which I label the “wealth hypothesis”—explains secessionism by focusing on macroeconomic conditions in Russia’s republics. In this approach, economic resources are the critical variable motivating republican separatism: leaders of resource-rich, economically developed republics made separatist demands on Moscow while leaders of comparatively poor republics did not. Economic explanations build on a general logic developed by Ernest

70. In Chechnya, for example, collective farms existed next to “traditional Chechen farms and communal organizations.” See Valery Tishkov, Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 24. In Kazakhstan, according to Martha Brill Olcott, traditional clanic and clerical leaders initially dominated local soviets and party cells. Cited in Suny, Revenge of the Past, 113–17.

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Gellner, Peter Gourevitch, Michael Hechter, Donald Horowitz, and Tom Nairn in which economic conditions produced by modernization and industrialization induce actors to support secession when they expect to profit from it.71 The wealth hypothesis has practically become conventional wisdom despite the fact that empirically it cannot account for separatism in Russia’s poor republics nor its absence in the rich ones. Wealth is also poorly correlated with secessionism among the union republics of the USSR.72 The inability of this approach to explain variance in outcomes is due to the fact that fixed structural or exogenous variables, divorced from intersubjective meanings shared by relevant political actors, tell us little about the actual interests and motivations of people on the ground. In addition, by focusing solely on elites, the wealth hypothesis overlooks the critical role played by mass publics. It fails to consider how the massive political transformations occurring at the time restructured incentives of republican leaders in ways that made them accountable to mass publics within the republics. There are several variants of the wealth hypothesis.73 The first maintains that the high level of separatism among certain Russian republics was a function of their natural resource endowments. Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, for example, writes that political intransigence and tax revolts in the republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Yakutia “were part of a broader strategy to widen the economic control rights of these wealthy republics over the proceeds from the extraction and sale of oil, gas, and diamonds located on their territories.”74 A second set of hypotheses defines 71. Ernst Gellner famously argued that nation-states were created by the effect of uneven modernization on economically marginalized groups exhibiting genetic-somatic, linguistic, or religious traits distinct from those of the economically dominant or state-bearing population. Peter Gourevitch and Tom Nairn hypothesize that relatively economically advanced ethnic elites in politically peripheral regions advocated secession to develop their regions’ economic potential. Hechter and Horowitz argue, by contrast, that relative economic backwardness inspires ethnic groups to increase their regions’ prospects through greater autonomy or independent statehood. See Gellner, Thought and Change and Nations and Nationalism; Horowitz, “Patterns of Ethnic Separatism” and Ethnic Groups in Conflict; Hechter, Internal Colonialism and “Group Formation and the Cultural Division of Labor”; Gourevitch, Paris and the Provinces: The Politics of Local Government Reform in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neonationalism (London: New Left Books, 1977). 72. Herrera, Imagined Economies, see chapter 1. 73. Philip Roeder’s explanation for variation in separatism among the URs could be considered the original version of the wealth hypothesis insofar as he notes that the republics with the most socioeconomically advanced nationalities were the most secessionist. However, instead of focusing on fixed economic structures, Roeder emphasizes how political and institutional factors interact to motivate the identities and behavior of elites and counterelites within the republics. Conversely, most accounts based on the wealth hypothesis address how economic structures directly inform republican leaders’ relations with Moscow. Roeder, “Soviet Federalism.” 74. Stoner-Weiss, “Federalism and Regionalism,” 239. Similarly, James Hughes notes that “the single most important common factor among the four most “ ‘secessionist’ . . . republics (Chechnya,

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wealth more broadly to mean a republic’s level of socioeconomic development. Henry Hale indicates economic development using the measure of retail commodity turnover per capita; Daniel Treisman uses a high industrial output and export, a high raw materials production, and a large population; and Kisangani Emizet and Vicki Hesli develop two indicators: a social development index (consisting of small family size, high urbanization, and the number of women workers) and a regional development index (including a high rate of consumer goods production and a high growth rate in its food industry). Each of these authors articulates a slightly different logic to explain the correlation between republican wealth and separatism.75 Emizet and Hesli as well as Hale maintain that Moscow’s status as a rapidly transforming, potentially hostile center inspired economically advanced republics to secede so they could protect privileges they had attained in the late Soviet era. If new elites hostile to regional autonomy were to win power in Moscow and recentralize the state, relatively rich republics had more to lose than did poor ones. Poor regions, on the other hand, depended on Moscow for the “goods of modernity.”76 Treisman argues that leaders of economically advanced republics understood that wealth, a large population, and bountiful resources increased their republics’ economic potential as independent states and thus strengthened their bargaining position with the center. Conversely, republics with weaker economies made few autonomy demands because leaders there weighed the cost of seceding against the benefit of continuing to receive subsidies and transfers from Moscow.77 According to Steve Solnick and others, economic wealth can also explain why the Russian Federation, unlike the Soviet Union, survived as an ethnofederal state. In response to separatism, the federal government granted the richer republics tax breaks, credits, subsidies, and political autonomy. In appeasing the wealthy republics at the expense of both the poorer ones and the nonethnic regions, Moscow created an asymmetric federation and avoided state collapse.78

Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Sakha) is that they all have significant economic resource endowments.” ”From Federalism to Recentralization,” 134. 75. Emizet and Hesli, “The Disposition to Secede”; Treisman, “Russia’s ‘Ethnic Revival’ ”; Hale, “Parade of Sovereignties”; and Hale and Taagepera, “Russia: Consolidation or Collapse?” 76. Robert Bates delineates this logic in “Modernization, Ethnic Competition, and the Rationality of Politics in Contemporary Africa,” in State versus Ethnic Claims: African Policy Dilemmas, ed. Donald Rothchild and Victor Olorunsola (Boulder: Westview, 1983), 159. 77. Treisman, “Russia’s ‘Ethnic Revival,’” 239. Treisman also finds that the variables of administrative status (republic vs. oblast or okrug), experienced leaders, strong ethnic movements, and institutionalized federal borders correlate with republican activism, and he argues that these factors strengthened the bargaining position of republican leaders as well. Ibid., and After the Deluge 78. Steven Solnick, “Will Russia Survive? Center and Periphery in the Russian Federation,” in Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and State-Building, ed. Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder (London: Routledge, 1998), 58–80; Mikhail Alexseev, “Decentralization versus State Collapse: Explaining Russia’s Endurance,” Journal of Peace Research 38, no. 1 (2002): 101–6; Hale and Taagepera, “Russia: Consolidation or Collapse?”; Daniel Treisman, After the Deluge.

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These wealth hypotheses seem persuasive because they explain strong separatism in certain union republics—the Baltics—and weak separatism in the underdeveloped Central Asian republics. Yet there is little correlation between separatism and republican wealth among the other union republics or among Russia’s republics. Moldova, for example, was not among the wealthiest of the URs, yet its separatist activity approached that of the Baltics; it hosted large mass nationalist demonstrations,79 was one of the first republics to pass a language law and demand full independence, and was one of six republics to boycott the March 1991 referendum on preserving the USSR.80 Armenia also was highly secessionist but not among the wealthiest republics.81 The republic of Belarus, on the other hand, displayed very little separatism yet was one of the most economically developed of the union republics.82 In Russia, the fact of separatism in Tuva—a tiny, poor republic whose economy centered on livestock herding— flatly contradicts the wealth hypothesis.83 The same is true of Chechnya. Though Chechnya contained some crude oil and an oil pipeline connecting Russia with refineries in Baku, its reserves made up a minuscule 1 percent of Russia’s total output in 1992, and its pipeline was threatened with redundancy by new pipeline projects already underway that bypassed the republic.84 The inconclusive relationship between republican wealth and separatism persists regardless of the way in which analysts measure republican wealth. Henry Hale and Rein Taagepera rank republican economic development based on retail commodity turnover as of 1988.85 Of the wealthiest Russian republics according to this measure—Komi, Karelia, and Yakutia—only Yakutia was separatist. Chechnya, with the lowest retail commodity turnover, was arguably the most 79. Paul Goble, “Moscow’s Nationality Problems in 1989,” RFE / RL Research Report, January 12, 1990, 13–14. 80. The others were Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia. 81. Hale and Taagepera rank Armenia as the ninth-wealthiest of the fifteen URs. “Russia: Consolidation or Collapse?” 1108. Not only did Armenia’s leaders refuse to hold the referendum, but they sponsored an alternative referendum on independence in which 99 percent of the population voted in favor. Ann Sheehy, “The All-Union and RSFSR Referendums of March 17,” RFE / RL Research Report, March 29, 1991, 19–23. 82. Hale and Taagepera rank Belarus as the fourth-wealthiest of the URs. “Russia: Consolidation or Collapse?”1108. 83. Treisman’s study develops a useful index of secessionism based on multiple indicators of republican activity but miscodes the critical case of Tuva as minimally secessionist. “Russia’s ‘Ethnic Revival,’” 224–25. He also reports a weak to nonexistent statistical relationship between the variables of wealth and separatism: his multivariate analysis shows only a fragile relationship between raw material output and industrial exports and high activism, and his bivariate analysis reveals no relationship between economically dependent republics and low activism. Ibid., 239n, 240. 84. Anatoly Khazanov, After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 219. 85. Of the fifteen union republics, Hale and Taagepera rank Moldova, Armenia, and Georgia seventh, eighth, and ninth but label them (along with the Baltics) the leading separatist regions. “Russia: Consolidation or Collapse?” 1106–7.

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nationalist of all Russian republics. In general, Chechnya and Tuva rank among Russia’s poorest regions, whether measured in terms of raw materials, population size, standard of living, or industrial production—yet they were the most secessionist.86 Moreover, an advanced economy did not spur separatism in Komi— a highly industrialized republic that contained enormous coal deposits and significant oil and gas fields.87 Therefore, though we observe that the republics of Tatarstan, Yakutia, and Bashkortostan were relatively resource-rich and experienced significant separatism, the fact remains that the wealth hypothesis can explain neither separatism in the poor republics of Russia nor its absence in the rich ones.88 This is not to say that the presence of economic wealth in Russia’s republics was inconsequential; it unquestionably informed the strategies of some republican leaders in their relations with Moscow. Republican leaders and other elites debated and considered local economic conditions during the course of campaigns for sovereignty and in negotiations with Moscow. But the mere presence or absence of wealth was not determinative; it did not influence the strategies of all nationalist and republican leaders, and it did not determine why ethnic populations in only certain republics responded to those leaders. Wealth hypotheses have little to say about where the masses fit into the story and cannot account for variation in mass response to nationalist leaders. These accounts assume that republican leaders acted autonomously within republican politics, conceiving of and making separatist demands on Moscow.89 Though it is clear that republican leaders strategically took advantage of nationalist mobilization within the republics to strengthen their negotiating position with the center, there is no evidence

86. Oksana Genrikhovna Dmitrieva, Regional'naia ekonomicheskaia diagnostika [Regional Economic Diagnostics] (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta Ekonomiki i Finansov, 1992), 128–32. 87. Similarly, Russia’s wealthiest ethnic regions—the autonomous okrugs of Khanty-Mansisk and Yamal-Nenets—also failed to make separatist demands. Though as okrugs, these regions had fewer institutions, rights, and privileges than republics, they were far richer, producing 80 percent of Russia’s oil and gas. Roy Bahl and Christine I. Wallich, “Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations in the Russian Federation,” in Decentralization of the Socialist State, ed. Richard M. Bird, Robert D. Ebel, and Christine I. Wallich (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 1995), 326. After federal relations had stabilized in the late 1990s, okrug leaders demanded administrative independence from Tyumen oblast to retain more control over natural resources. See “Khanty-Mansi Avtonomnyi Okrug” in Regiony Rossii: Statisticheskii sbornik [Regions of Russia: Statistical Handbook] (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1999). 88. Dmitry Gorenburg’s study also challenges the wealth hypothesis. He finds that nationalism was lower in the republic of Khakassia than in Chuvashia, despite the fact that the former was more economically developed than the latter. Minority Ethnic Mobilization, 165–66. 89. Henry Hale’s account is a partial exception insofar as he recognizes that support for nationalism may differ among republican leaders and other subrepublican actors. Hale maintains, however, that the same macroeconomic factors will motivate all republican actors. Hale, “The Parade of Sovereignties.”

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that republican populations reflexively mobilized when republican leaders told them to. Characterizing ethnic populations as passive tools of politicians overestimates the power of ethnicity as a basis for political behavior. It assumes that ethnic populations are naturally or automatically nationalist or will become nationalist upon the command of politicians. This view treats elites as strategic actors but mass populations as passive instruments who were either (1) “genuine” nationalists, patiently waiting for their chance at statehood or (2) Soviet subjects, dutifully obeying their leaders’ commands. Such a distinction between crafty leaders and credulous masses rings false and is also empirically inaccurate insofar as local populations and nationalist movements did not allow republican leaders to direct their political behavior. This approach essentializes Russia’s ethnic populations and overestimates the power of ethnicity as a basis of political action. Instead, republican residents, like citizens living in Russia’s nonethnic regions, behaved rationally, backing one or another politician and occasionally shifting or withdrawing their support. Thus, although economic-structural hypotheses clearly delineate economic and structural influences on elite strategies, they make the invalid assumption that the ethnic masses are either perpetually nationalist or easily become so at the will of nationalist politicians. In conclusion, the hypotheses found in the post–Soviet politics literature on secessionism that emphasize variables of ethnic group demography, cultural difference, economic resources, and strategic elites do not, in and of themselves, provide sufficient explanations for either the emergence of nationalist mobilization in Russia’s republics or the variance in mobilization across republics. Such approaches naturalize the existence of bounded ethnocultural groups and view them as easily triggered into political action along ethnic lines. This cancels out the very difficult question of why ethnicity matters politically in the first place and why people mobilize along ethnic lines to achieve particular political goals. The next chapter addresses this question.

3 DOES STRUCTURE MATTER? Local Labor Markets and Social Mobility

Did adverse economic conditions at the end of the Soviet era in Russia’s republics inspire people to support republican nationalism? This chapter addresses this question by analyzing socioeconomic stratification among ethnic groups. This theme has received wide attention in the general literature on ethnic politics, perhaps most famously in Gellner’s model in which Ruritanian workers seek national independence from Megalomania after being shut out of desirable jobs in the core state.1 In this chapter I investigate social mobility and the labor market position of Russians and titulars in Russia’s sixteen republics to understand how these variables relate to the emergence of, and variation in, mass nationalist mobilization across republics.2 The argument of this book is that mass nationalism developed when people had certain experiences in local economies that allowed entrepreneurs’ issue framings of ethnic economic inequality to resonate. I describe those experiences in the first part of this chapter by presenting data on social mobility and discussing the macroeconomic contraction of the Soviet economy during perestroika. Then I examine whether socioeconomic structural 1. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. Also see Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 108–31; Leo Despres, ed. Ethnicity and Resource Competition in Plural Societies (The Hague: Mouton, 1975); Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market,” American Sociological Review 37 (October 1971): 547–59. 2. Several studies of nationalism in the USSR examine these variables, though not at the mass level. See Roeder, “Soviet Federalism”; David Laitin, “The Nationalist Uprisings in the Soviet Union,” World Politics 44 (1991): 139–77. An exception is Robert Kaiser’s “Nationalizing the Work Force: Ethnic Restratification in the Newly Independent States,” Post-Soviet Geography 36, no. 2 (February 1995): 87–111. 60

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conditions motivated people to support nationalist transformation once economic crisis set in. Specifically, I test whether the variables of interethnic job competition and an ethnic division of labor (EDL) are associated with nationalism across Russia’s republics.3 I find no clear relationship between either of these variables and nationalist mobilization. Therefore, adverse socioeconomic structural conditions by themselves cannot explain mass nationalist mobilization in Russia.

Socioconomic Stratification and Ethnic Mobilization At the beginning of the Soviet era, a division of labor existed in which titular ethnic groups in Russia’s republics worked in the countryside while Russians occupied more highly skilled jobs in republican cities. This division was not structured entirely along ethnic lines since almost all citizens at that time, including ethnic Russians, lived and worked in rural regions. However, cities in the republics were dominated by Russians who held highly desired jobs. By the end of the Soviet era the situation had changed dramatically. Large numbers of titulars had moved to the cities, had assumed jobs alongside Russians, spoke Russian, and lived their lives in a Soviet cultural milieu. The acculturation of non-Russians to a homogenized, Soviet standard progressed further in most of the ARs than in the URs, but it also varied across Russia’s republics.4 Some residents of the republics with titular identities continued to speak non-Russian languages, maintain traditional livelihoods such as farming or herding, and live in rural areas. But even in the poorest, least industrialized republics, titulars had made substantial socioeconomic gains. The Soviet citizenry as a whole underwent enormous social change as a result of general development programs instituted by the Soviet state, including urbanization, public education, and industrialization. As Moshe Lewin has argued, these programs so transformed the Soviet population following World War II that by the late 1980s, a new urban constituency consisting of a managerial, technical, educational, and political elite had emerged to challenge the Soviet system.5 Titular populations also experienced massive social change, in large part because the Soviet state implemented nationality policies designed to advance

3. I adapt Michael Hechter’s concept of a cultural division of labor, discussed below. 4. See Suny’s discussion of acculturation in Revenge of the Past, 125. 5. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

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their socioeconomic position within the republics.6 These policies included Russian language education, the use of internal passports listing ethnic affiliation, and korenizatsiia, or affirmative action policies in higher education and the occupational sphere. This chapter examines social change in the republics and rising social mobility among titulars by presenting data on population growth, urbanization, linguistic Russification, education, and occupational representation from the USSR State Statistical Committee, or Goskomstat. By the end of the Soviet era, socioeconomic mobility led people to anticipate that the state would continue to provide educations, jobs, occupational advancement, and in many cases, social status. Yet the Soviet economy’s stagnating rates of growth that had begun during the Brezhnev era accelerated under Gorbachev. A deteriorating economic situation led to a general increase in competition for education and jobs and also raised people’s fears about job loss. I will discuss how macrolevel change brought about by the Soviet state’s production crisis and economic reforms affected employment in the country. I then consider whether socioeconomic structural conditions induced people to support nationalism as the country’s economic crisis deepened. Did the fact of rising social mobility and job competition in a centrally planned economy motivate demands for nationalist transformation in the republics? Or were titular nationalities driven to support nationalism by other forms of economic adversity such as an ethnic division of labor, in which they lagged behind Russians socioeconomically? To address these questions, I compare Russia’s republics by constructing two indexes of socioeconomic stratification: one using data showing change in socioeconomic processes over time in the republics (index of trends in socioeconomic stratification) and one using cross-sectional data from a fixed point in time— the end of the Soviet era (index of socioeconomic stratification as of 1989). The indexes rank Russia’s republics according to population growth, urbanization, linguistic Russification, education, and occupational representation. Each of these processes is an indicator of the position of titulars and Russians on a scale of socioeconomic stratification. For each indicator, I assign the republics a score of 1, 2, or 3. Republics that fall at the high end of the scale have titular and Russian populations that are more separated or socioeconomically stratified than other republics and are thus more likely to display an ethnic division of labor. Republics at the low end of the scale have titular and Russian populations that are more integrated or socioeconomically equivalent than other republics and

6. Suny, Revenge of the Past, 109. Also see Graham Smith, “The Soviet State and Nationalities Policy” in Graham Smith ed., The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States (New York: Longman, 1996), 2–22.

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are therefore more likely to experience competition for jobs. In order to summarize the descriptive statistics, I add the scores of all indicators and compute an average rank of socioeconomic stratification for each republic. I treat the indicators as if they are categorical variables that can be compared with each other, although they are not. Examining the average scores of the republics on the two indexes provides a quick numerical depiction of two compelling points. First, the socioeconomic position of Russians and titulars in most republics was not clear-cut. Contrary to expectations about minority populations in the Soviet Union and to observations made by some Western and Russian analysts,7 a pronounced ethnic division of labor did not exist in any of Russia’s republics. Titular populations in all republics demonstrated social mobility, even in places like Checheno-Ingushetia and Tuva, where Russians continued to hold a majority of white-collar jobs at the end of the Soviet era. However, while the fact of titular mobility suggests a homogeneity across republics, in fact, the picture of titular-Russian socioeconomic stratification detected in a republic depends on the particular indicator we observe. Examining a particular indicator may show that titulars lagged behind Russians on that indicator—i.e., that an ethnic division of labor was present—whereas examining another indicator may show that titulars were in a position to compete with Russians for educations and jobs. This means that it is not possible to state that either an EDL or ethnic competition objectively existed in Russia’s republics during the period of national revival. This is precisely the reason why multiple interpretations of economic conditions were possible at the time. Ethnic entrepreneurs, nationalist leaders, and ordinary people could observe and understand local socioeconomic conditions in different ways. In certain republics, nationalists focused their message on specific conditions in order to make a case for inequality and discrimination facing titular ethnic groups. Second, comparative analysis of Russia’s sixteen republics reveals no correlation between mass nationalism and the variables of socioeconomic stratification. In other words, neither the republics that might be characterized as having an EDL according to certain indicators nor those that might be characterized as displaying ethnic competition are associated with nationalist mobilization. This suggests that structural conditions—the socioeconomic exclusion of titulars or competition between titulars and Russians—did not generate a group grievance among people with titular identities. A cultural division of labor (CDL) forms, according to Michael Hechter, when members of an economically subordinate group become aware of their 7. For example, see Andrew Jack’s characterization of Chechens as subordinate to Russians in Chechnya in Inside Putin’s Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

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CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE

exclusion from desirable occupations and when objective cultural differences among groups—in language, religion, and lifestyle—overlap with occupational exclusion.8 In a situation of internal colonialism, a dominant group from the state core exploits a minority living in an economically subordinate periphery. Once members of a minority group become aware of the exploitation, they establish social and political organizations to express a grievance and mobilize politically to augment their rights or secede from the state.9 Observers might characterize Russia’s republics as internal colonies with an ethnic division of labor since titular nationalities lived in economically underdeveloped and politically peripheral areas of the country, whereas Russians controlled the core state and dominated advanced economic sectors. If an EDL had been present in Russia’s republics, we would have observed titular populations concentrated in republican rural regions, speaking titular languages instead of Russian, poorly represented in higher education, and underrepresented in white-collar jobs by comparison with Russians. According to Hechter’s model, titulars would have become conscious of these inequalities and resentful of the central state and would have mobilized behind nationalism. Alternatively, Russia’s republics could be described as having experienced interethnic labor competition at the end of the Soviet era. According to competition theory, industrialization and modernization bring “culturally heterogeneous populations” into competition for rewards and resources such as jobs. As people compete, solidarity within societal groups increases, stimulating mass mobilization.10 For example, Susan Olzak shows that workers born in the United 8. Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Internal Colonialism; and “Group Formation and the Cultural Division of Labor.” Hechter’s argument belongs to the “reactive ethnicity” category of explanation. See Charles Ragin, “Class, Status, and ‘Reactive Ethnic Cleavages’: The Social Bases of Political Regionalism,” American Sociological Review 42 (June 1979): 438–50. 9. Note that for Hechter, a CDL does not invariably produce ethnic mobilization. People must also have a general awareness of the situation as “unjust and illegitimate,” which, he argues, develops through communication among members of the “oppressed community” at schools, the workplace, neighborhoods, churches, social clubs, and voluntary organizations. Thus residential and occupational segregation of the oppressed community critically contributes to the formation of ethnic group consciousness. Hechter also argues that the more pronounced and visible the cultural differences between the subordinate and core groups are, the more solidary the subordinate group will become and the more likely it will be to mobilize for separatism. Hechter, Internal Colonialism, 40, 42, 43; Hechter, “Group Formation,” 297, 300. Also see Hechter, “Nationalism as Group Solidarity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 10 (October 1987): 415–26. 10. Competition theorists build on the pathbreaking work of anthropologist Frederik Barth, who observed that conflict among ethnic groups results not from differences over cultural attributes or practices but from competition over common resources after people move into one another’s ecological niche. Barth notes, however, that resource competition can also produce intergroup stability. See Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969); Francois Nielsen, “Toward a Theory of Ethnic Solidarity,” and “The Flemish

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States mobilized against European immigrant and black workers from the U.S. south when they began to compete for jobs in American labor markets at the turn of the century.11 She finds that exogenous shocks to labor markets—such as a sudden contraction of the economy, a surge in immigration, and the desegregation of the markets—increased competition for jobs, and this in turn raised group consciousness, increased the salience of group boundaries, and produced ethnic conflict. If interethnic competition had driven ethnic mobilization in the ARs, we would have observed an increase in competition between Russians and titulars brought about by rising titular urbanization, linguistic Russification, expanding titular access to education, and increasing representation of titulars in white-collar occupations. Macroeconomic contraction during late perestroika could have intensified that competition, inspiring titular nationalities to mobilize for sovereign statehood. The next section describes how populations in Russian’s republics underwent major social transformation during the twentieth century and compares the republics by ranking each according to the degree to which the socioeconomic position of Russians and titulars could be described as indicating either an ethnic division of labor or interethnic competition.

Social Transformation in Russia’s Republics Population Growth After the Second World War, the size of the population in Russia’s republics swelled as a result of both natural rate of increase (birthrate) and in-migration. In the thirty-year period from 1959 to 1989, the rate of population growth in the republics exceeded that of the RSFSR (35.3 percent vs. 25.1 percent) and was comparable to the rate of growth in the USSR overall.12 During the same period, the size of the Russian population in the republics also expanded. Russians

Movement in Belgium.” Conversely, Horowitz argues that job competition rarely leads to interethnic conflict. See chapter 4 in Ethnic Groups in Conflict. 11. Susan Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 12. This can be partly explained by a birthrate that was nearly twice as high among titular populations as among ethnic Russians living in the republics. Within this general trend of population growth some titular populations expanded faster than others: Chechens and Ingush tripled, and Tuvans and Kalmyks more than doubled. All other titular populations increased at a lower but positive rate except those in Mordovia and Karelia. M. N. Guboglo, Razvitie etnogdemograficheskoi situatsii v stolitsakh avtonomnykh respublik v 1959–1989 gg (po materialam perepisei naseleniia SSSR), document no. 33 (Moscow: IEA-RAN, 1992), 2–4. Guboglo notes that the state published fewer statistics about the ARs than about the URs.

16.5

17.2

23.3

51.1

24.4

Buryatia

N. Ossetia

Komi

Kabardino-

1.6

3.9

Mari El

41.7

54.1 14.7

10.3

31.6

26.1

22.1

67.2

86.9

91.8

69

84.1

Mordovia

38.4

54.7

–3.3

18.8

Dagestan

50.8

6.7

19.8

Chuvashia

5

91.9

48.8

15.6

79.6

90.9

88.7

84.2

97.5

93.6

Udmurtia

43

14.4

49.3

17.3

7.6

49.4

83.8

26.3

0.8

20.5

9.2

1.1

14.8

Balkaria

44.6

46.7

65.6

42.3

62.6

49.4

78.5

27

14.5

Karelia

6.6

Kalmykia

51.2

–0.5

12.8

Bashkortostan

–2.4

73.6 Ch

69.9

27.9

46

59.3

80.6

39.7

37

41.2

42.1

Yakutia

28

8.9 25.9

80 Ing

20.5

Checheno-

31.9

Ingushetia

12

69

16

16

27

29

9

–7

13

–11

19

–42

–28

36

38

22

89

64

70

8

116

118

173

139

115

279

206

119

272

354

106

304

170

234

212

151

195

171

EDU2

EDU1

LANG

URB3

URB2

URB1

RPOP

0.2

TITULAR STUDENTS IN VUZY, 1989

PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN TITULAR VUZY STUDENTS, 1974–89

PERCENTAGE OF TITULARS SPEAKING RUSSIAN, 1989

TITULAR SHARE OF URBAN POPULATION, 1989

INCREASE IN TITULAR SHARE OF URBAN POPULATION, 1959–89

URBAN PERCENTAGE OF TITULARS, 1989

PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN RUSSIAN POPULATION, 1926–89

Demographic and socioeconomic trends in Russia’s republics

Tuva

Tatarstan

Table 3.1

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Table 3.2 Index of trends in socioeconomic stratification TATARSTAN

TUVA

CHECHENO-INGUSHETIA

YAKUTIA

BASHKORTOSTAN

KALMYKIA

KARELIA

BURYATIA

N. OSSETIA

KOMI

KABARDINO-BALKARIA

CHUVASHIA

UDMURTIA

DAGESTAN

MARI EL

MORDOVIA

POP URB2 EDU1 SUM AVG. RANK

3 2 2 7 2.3

2 1 1 4 1.3

1 1 1 3 1

1 3 2 6 2

3 2 2 7 2.3

1 2 2 5 1.6

2 3 3 8 2.6

2 2 3 7 2.3

1 1 2 4 1.3

1 3 3 7 2.3

1 1 3 5 1.6

3 2 2 7 2.3

2 3 2 7 2.3

3 1 2 6 2

3 2 2 7 2.3

3 2 2 7 2.3

Note: 1 = ethnic competition (EC); 3 = ethnic division of labor (EDL). POP: 1 = Size of Russian population increased by 20% or more, 1926–89; 2 = Size of Russian population remained relatively same (10% to 20% increase), 1926–89; 3 = Size of Russian population decreased or grew by less than 10%, 1926–89. URB2: 1 = Titular share of urban population grew by 20 percentage points or more, 1959–89; 2 = Titular share of urban population grew by 6 to 19 percentage points, 1959–89; 3 = Titular share of urban population grew by 5 percentage points or less, 1959–89. EDU1: 1 = Percentage change in titular VUZy students, 64% or more, 1974–89; 2 = Percentage change in titular VUZy students, 8%–38%; 3 = Percentage change in titular VUZy students, –7% or more, 1974–89.

from throughout the Soviet Union moved to the republics to take jobs at new industrial production and natural resource extraction sites, and this movement caused the proportion of Russians relative to titulars to rise in all but five republics.13 For example, the discovery of gold in the 1920s in Yakutia caused the Russian portion of the population there to increase from 11 to 50 percent by the end of the Soviet era. The percentage point change in the size of Russian populations in all republics from 1926 to 1989 (RPOP) is shown in table 3.1. A growing population and a rising Russian population in particular brought more people in the republics into contact with one another. Because most Russians migrating to the republics did so to work in cities and at industrial sites, an increase in the size of the Russian population in a particular republic bolstered the possibility that competition for resources could develop between titulars and Russians. Therefore, I include this indicator in the index of trends in socioeconomic stratification (table 3.2) and assign a score of 1 to those republics with the largest increase in the Russian population: Checheno-Ingushetia, Yakutia, Kalmykia, N. Ossetia, Komi, and Kabardino-Balkaria.14 Conversely, the size of

13. Russians also moved to work in industrial sites in Latvia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine. For a comparison of the UR and ARs, see Alastair McAuley, ed., Soviet Federalism: Nationalism and Decentralisation (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 68. 14. See Guboglo, Razvitie, 127–28. In these places, there was a corresponding decline in titulars’ share of republican populations. Although some nationalist leaders lamented this drop, it was not correlated with mass nationalist mobilization.

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CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE

Table 3.3 Index of socioeconomic stratification as of 1989

2 1 2 2 2

MORDOVIA

2 1 2 1 2

MARI EL

2 3 1 3 1

DAGESTAN

1 1 2 1 1

UDMURTIA

2 3 2 1 1

CHUVASHIA

1 3 1 3 2

KABARDINO-BALKARIA

2 1 1 1 1

KOMI

2 3 2 2 2

N. OSSETIA

3 3 3 1 2

BURYATIA

BASHKORTOSTAN

3 1 2 2 3

KARELIA

YAKUTIA

3 1 3 2 2

KALMYKIA

CHECHENO-INGUSHETIA

1 1 2 2 2

TUVA

TATARSTAN

URB1 URB3 LANG EDU2 JOB

2 3 1 3 2

3 1 3 2 2

2 3 2 3 3

2 3 1 3 2

SUM 8 11 11 12 11 6 10 9 6 10 8 9 11 11 13 11 AVG RANK 1.6 2.2 2.2 2.4 2.2 1.2 2 1.8 1.2 2 1.6 1.8 2.2 2.2 2.6 2.2 Note: 1 = ethnic competition (EC); 3 = ethnic division of labor (EDL). URB1: 1 = Titular populations with largest percentage of urban dwellers (>62%); 2 = Titular populations with middle percentage of urban dwellers (41%–55%); 3 = Titular populations with smallest percentage of urban dwellers (28–38%). URB3: 1 = Republics in which titular share of urban population. is greater than or equal to that of Russians (40% or more); 3 = Republics in which titular share of urban population is 26% or less. LANG: 1 = Republics in which more than 90% of titulars speak Russian; 2 = Republics in which 70–90% of titulars speak Russian; 3 = Republics in which fewer than 70% of titulars speak Russian. EDU2: 1 = Titulars with largest number of students in VUZy (>200 students per 10,000 people); 2 = Titulars with between 120 and 200 students in VUZy; 3 = Titular nationalities with fewest students in VUZy (